New Book Explores Automating the Managed Application Lifecycle to Accelerate Delivery of Business Applications

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the first in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion that examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers some new methods for overall business services delivery improvement.

We'll explore the current state of applications in large organizations, and how complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options, have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches.

In the book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors pursue the role and impact of automation and management over applications, as well as delving into the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

This is the first, in a series of three podcasts, on the ALM book, and we're here now with the authors to learn, first and foremost, why they wrote it, and to explore their major findings.

Please join me now in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Sarbiewski: Thank, you Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Hipps: Thanks, Dana

Gardner: I wonder if we could first begin by looking at why applications have been in trouble, what's going on, and why is there a huge opening now for improving how they have been built, consumed, and managed. Why don't we start with you, Mark?

A silver bullet

Sarbiewski: It's really a combination of factors, which is part of the challenge that customers have. They're looking for a silver bullet.

In most large enterprises, applications have been built up over many, many years. You throw acquisitions into that and you end up with layers of applications, in a lot of which there is redundancy. You have this wide mix of technology, huge amounts of legacy, all built different ways, and the business just wants response faster, faster, and faster.

So, we have old technologies hampering us. We have an old approach that we've built that technology on, and the modern world is dramatically different in a whole host of ways. We're changing our process. We're changing the way our teams are structured to be much more global teams, outsourced, nearshore, far shore, all of that stuff, and the technology is fundamentally shifting as well.

That's the context for why you see all these horror stories and these stats about the businesses' level of satisfaction with the responsiveness of IT, particularly in applications. If you think about it, that's what the business experience is.

They understand, have you automated this business process? Have you helped me take the website to a better place and give me a richer experience for my customers? It's the apps that the business experiences. When they see it move at glacial pace for all those reasons we just talked about, that's where IT organizations are looking to change the game.

Gardner: Brad Hipps, from your perspective, these have been problems that have been building for a long time. So why the book now?

Hipps: I'll speak from not only conversations with customers, but my own personal experience when I was running application delivery teams. A lot of these trends that we talk about -- outsourcing, service-based architectures, more flexible methodologies, whether it's iterative or agile -- you wouldn't necessary call any one of those brand new. Those things have been around for a few years now. Many enterprises we speak with and deal with have been leveraging them for a few years in some form or fashion.

If you're an owner of application teams or of a series of applications within an enterprise, these things tend to sneak in. By "these things" I mean these trends. They tend to sneak in on the perimeter, and you wake up one morning and realize all of a sudden that fundamentally the way your teams have long operated has been changed.

In some ways, it's death by a thousand cuts. No single one of these initiatives is going to force you to take a step back and say, hold the phone, let's figure out if the way we deliver applications now requires us to, in some significant way, rethink the mechanisms by which we conduct delivery.

From my own experience, it's difficult to get the time or the brain space to do that. Usually, you're neck deep in getting the next application out the door. You've got deadlines. You've got other applications or enhancements coming down the pike.

Necessary questions

You may not have the time to take a step back and say, "Wow, we're using these different methods" or "We're relying more on outsource teams, so we are not all colocated," or "We've got these new technologies we have begun delivering. What does that mean for performance and security of the application?" -- all the questions that those kinds of trends beg.

One of the objectives of this book was to do just that. Mark and I had the luxury to take a step back and think about what these trends mean soup to nuts for the way applications get stood up and delivered and how, from an enterprise perspective, we have responded or not responded to those new complexities.

Gardner: Mark Sarbiewski, in the book you guys deliver a really interesting comparison. You say the jet fighter cockpit was an example of where too many things happening at once overwhelm the pilot. So, rather than try to keep improving what the pilot was capable of, perhaps beyond what was natural, they redesigned a cockpit. How does that relate to what we are talking about here with ALM?

Sarbiewski: That’s a decent analogy for one of the critical design principles that we think is a way an enterprise should approach delivering and running applications. The idea is that you need both management and automation to achieve your end goals.

People have long thought of those things in very narrow ways. They've thought of management of a narrow domain space, like managing requirements and automating GUI functional tests. Those were all good steps forward, important things, but there was little connection between management across the lifecycle and automation across the lifecycle.

You've got to think about both -- not only across the lifecycle, but how they interlock.

The example of that jet fighter you can even extend to you driving a car. You're managing the car, managing how fast you go, and seeing the gauges. They're giving you information about the direction you're headed, if you have a nav system, how long it's going to take, all that. When you hit the gas, automation takes over. When you turn the wheel, it goes in a different direction.

Part of what we're trying to get at here is this interplay. You've got to think about both -- not only across the lifecycle, but how they interlock -- to create the situation where I see what's happening. I see across these very complex endeavors that I'm undertaking, many people, many teams, many stakeholders, lots of projects, lots of interdependencies, so I have that visibility. When we need to step on the gas and go in a particular direction, and speed everything up without blowing everything up, that's when I can rely on nicely integrated automation.

Gardner: Now, we are also seeing in the market a definition shift in applications. There's a new emphasis on services, agility, reuse, rapid iterations, and even ecosystems, where we're getting services and applications from a variety of sources.

This is different from what we could call super apps or the big honkin' packaged and integrated apps of the past. How is that shift impacting this, and how does that relate to your book? Let me start with you, Brad.

Hipps: We were talking earlier about these trends and complexities. You can speak about them at a headline level, but then you can take a particular example, like the one you're touching on. The nature of an application today is that it's not a monolith. It's not owned by a single project team or a program consisting of several teams.

Leveraging what we can

More often than not, it's something that has been assembled using a series of subcomponents, reusable services, or borrowed function points from other applications, etc. It's this thing that is, in the best sense, cobbled together. Rather than writing it all from scratch, we're leveraging what we can.

We can all agree that this makes sense, it’s the right way to do it, it's much more assembly line production versus handcrafting everything, which is certainly the direction we want to be headed in, from a software perspective.

But, that also presents us a lot of new challenges. How do I have visibility or discover the components that are out there, that are available for me to use? How do I trust that those components are reliable, that they are going to behave and perform in the way I want them to? Given the fact that I, as a given developer, didn't actually create it myself, how can I have faith in it? And, how are we going to authenticate all these different pieces?

It was one game of validation when, as I say, it was a monolith and all self-contained, and we executed our test from top to bottom, but now we have these individual subparts. We have to test each of them of themselves and then we have got make sure that connected they also do the same thing. A lot of them are GUI, so that presents its own complexity. How am I automating the test against something that has no GUI front-end, but I can record a playback?

I am speaking just at the the technical level. If you marry some of those tricks or hiccups against the reality of how that's going to be delivered, it's going to be delivered by multiple teams. Almost inevitably, those teams are not all going to be sharing one building. They're going to be located in different places.

It's not complexity plus complexity, it's more like complexity times complexity, when you consider modern delivery and its particulars.

So you've got these questions. How do we collaborate? How do we communicate? How do we notify each other of defects? How am I aware when something is ready to retest? Relying on email is, let's just say, less than ideal. And, of course, we may be using different methods. Multiple teams could be using different methods. Those over there are working in agile fashion, we are working in waterfall fashion.

So the catchphrase we have, which may or may not make sense, it's not complexity plus complexity, it's more like complexity times complexity, when you consider modern delivery and its particulars.

Gardner: I suppose another change over the past 10 or 15 years has been the impact that these applications have on a business. In the past, they may have been great for building efficiency, approving productivity, maybe even just a nice to have, versus more manual ways of accomplishing business.

But nowadays, and I would like to borrow quote from the book, the business moves, changes, and expands only as fast and as efficiently as the applications do. So, applications are vastly more important now to a company. Mark, help me better understand why that's the case.

Sarbiewski: You'll see from a variety of industry folks that these eras of computing, when it was data processing, information management, or MIS, came through to the web, it's gone from "let's collate information and spin it around for the business" to "this is literally how we conduct nearly everything that we do."

Internal users

I'm talking internal users, whether it's working with their training systems, working with their expense systems, recording sales, tracking customers and prospects, just about everything goes into some software application.

Between companies and the supply chain is highly automated, all sorts of software, gluing partner and ecosystems together, and increasingly direct to the customer. We just take it for granted now that I actually don't ever really have to go to a bank anymore. I can just do everything I used to do in person now via their website, their web applications.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

I talk to our customers about the challenge. This is another thing that crept up on them. Just about every square inch of the enterprise is automated in some way by software. You always get a lot of nodding heads. What it has meant for IT teams is that you now have to understand every square inch of the business, and the businesses are incredibly dynamic. So, any part that changes almost drags along, or in some cases, is led by, and has to be led by, innovation in the software to make that happen.

I often tell customers that you are running significant large scale software or entities inside your business. You may not think of yourself that way, but a big business will have potentially thousands of apps. It will have software and potentially products that it builds. It will be orchestrating a whole huge mix of technologies, and inside and outside teams, which is more complex than what a lot of independent software vendors (ISVs) do. And my argument to them is that you need to make software a core competency if you are going to differentiate your business going forward.

So it's hugely important. There is example after example of innovations that businesses have created. One of my favorite ones to talk about is Bank of America's Keep the Change initiative. We had a little bit of insight into what that involved. That was an IT-led thing. The ability to use a debit card, have the leftover change rolled into a savings account, required massive software, updating new stuff to have it happened, and it has been hugely differentiating for that company.

Traditionally, in our legacy world, the push was always, can we get the application delivered?

Hipps: Mark, if I am not mistaken, there were tens of applications behind that one initiative, were there not?

Sarbiewski: Absolutely. Updates to existing ones, many tens of new ones, all had to come together on launch date. Think about that? IT is not reacting to "It would be nice if we could have this capability. It would make our lives easier." This was, "We are going to differentiate our business based on this. So, those 70 odd applications that you are building or modifying will have to be here on the launch date, because it's a business initiative."

Gardner: So, while we've had incredible increase in complexity, we have redefined these applications over a period of years. They have now taken on a much larger role within the company and yet, in many organizations, there is this legacy mechanism in place for how applications are treated. This perhaps is the disconnect

I'll throw that out to either of you. How bad is that? How much of a lag do we have here between what's required in organizations to do ALM properly, and what's the real run-of-the-mill way of doing it?

Hipps: The first company I worked with building applications probably had three of four major applications they worried about. One of the biggest ones, not surprisingly, was the billing and rating system that they had created. I think the first release of that system took us two years to get out the door. It was your classic custom-developed application. Many hands were on deck, cranking out code, running tests, and all the stuff you would expect.

Traditionally, in our legacy world, the push was always, can we get the application delivered? Can we get it stood up and working and out the door? And if we did that, we went to our ops brethren and we said, "Look guys, just don't kick the plug out. Just leave it alone, and we'll wait until we have another release sometime next year. We will have the next big push."

When we lived in that world -- and for many of us in apps who grew up in that world, not 40 years ago, but 15 years ago -- it's understandable that we've long taken this view that as long as we get the application built and stood-up, we've done what we need to do for the business.

A lot more planning

If we try to fix that legacy view against what we have been talking about today, which is effectively that the business can't twitch without requiring some change in a set of applications somewhere, we know that the reality of the world is that there is a heck of a lot more planning activity that goes on. We've got applications everywhere. They're going to be under constant review, modification, enhancement, addition, etc., and that's going to be a an endless stream.

We've got an expectation, given the web world we live in, that these applications, many of them anyway, are going to be always on, always available, always morphing to meet whatever the latest, greatest idea is, and we have got to run them accordingly.

We have got to make sure that once they are out there and available, they are responsive. We have got to make sure that the teams that own them in the data centers are aware of their behaviors, and aware of which of those behaviors are configurable, without even coming back to the application teams.

The legacy view said, "Wow, the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is the end-all, be-all. If I get the SDLC right, if I get requirements and deployment done right, I win." We realize that this is still critical. What we would describe as the core lifecycle is still where it all begins.

But, this thing is going to live for 15 years. It's going to undergo endless amounts of change in that process. If I'm going to really be successful against what it is the business is after, I do have to account for this complete lifecycle. All the stuff that's happening before requirements, the portfolio investigation that's occurring, the architectural decisions I am making, have got to be true across the enterprise, as well of course as everything that happens once that thing goes live.

We've got an expectation, given the web world we live in, that these applications, many of them anyway, are going to be always on, always available, always morphing.

How well connected I am with my operation peers? Have I shared the right information? Have I shared test scripts where possible? Am I linked into service desk? Am I aware of issues, as they are arising, ideally before the business is hearing about it? Those things are what we mean by getting your arms around the complete lifecycle is what's necessary, when you think about the modern delivery of applications.

Gardner: Let's drill into that a little bit, now that we understand that. That gap needs to be closed between what applications need to have in terms of support across your lifecycle and some of the traditional ways of doing that. And your suggestions in the beginning of the book are strong management and automation, but integrated.

Mark, what’s the need for integrating and what do you mean by integrating management and automation?

Sarbiewski: It goes back to that analogy of driving a car. You're doing both, and both things are happening in concert. I'm managing. I'm seeing the flow of information. I'm guiding this car, stepping on the gas, etc., and the engine and the suspension system is doing the heavy lifting of pushing me faster, or brakes are slowing me down, in a very automated way. I'm acting in a management capacity, on the management information I have. I'm relying on automation to make these types of things happen.

In the world of software delivery and obviously the operation phase, it's very similar. You have a whole series of things. For example, we'll start at the beginning, let's assume. We would argue that the beginning of an application is the idea, the request. I need to have X for the business.

Specific requirements

We judge whether or not this is of value against all other requests, and we decide we're going to do something. Now, I get into trying to understand the specific requirements. Even in the requirements, there is an aspect that can be a level of automation and a level of management.

Automation can come in when I am building a visualization, a quick prototype, and there are some great solutions that have emerged into the market to help a non-technical user create a representation of an application that has almost the perfect look and feel. We're not talking about generating code. We're talking about using HTML and tools to create the flow, the screen views, and the data input of what an application is going to look like.

You hear that a picture is worth a thousand words. This goes to one of the fundamental broken things that we have had forever about requirements. You and I have a discussion, and I write something down in text. This is a very poor articulation of what you really want and need, but if I can show you something, you can play around with it and give a look and feel to it and make comments on that -- very different.

Once we get to that look and feel of an app, at the push of a button, I can interpret all those business rules, all those rules about where was data, what was on the screen, was this data hidden, what was inputted, when did it flow to the next one, under what condition. All of that will get translated into a series of text-based requirements, test assets to test for that logic, and even the results and the rules and the data that needs to be input.

So, I have a process. I have had discussion and used some technology to visualize these requirements. At the push of a button, I automated the complete articulation, with perfect fidelity, including the positive test cases I want to run. I can manage those now, as I have always have, and my systems and teams expected to.

I now can push that information to each of the key stakeholders and automate the workflow behind that. This is what we mean when talk about changing the game.

Those requirements trigger test and defects and go against code, all of which can be linked. Whenever progress is made in any dimension against those requirements, I have created a test for one, I have run a test for one. I have run ten tests and eight paths. I have checked new coding against the bugs. All of that can be tied together and automated with workflow.

So, you start to see how I've got a creative series of information. I use automation to advance it to the next stage. I now can push that information to each of the key stakeholders and automate the workflow behind that. This is what we mean when talk about changing the game and how you deliver software, by doing just that, thinking about, what are the things that I have to manage and how does automation speed things up, and create outputs with greater fidelity and greater speed.

Hipps: In an ideal world, this idea of integrated management and automation is essentially a move away from the world we've had for a long time in software, which is, I have a series of individuated point tools that I use for particular siloed functions. As Mark said earlier, that was necessary, that was useful, and that was the critical step, but we shouldn't expect that or view that as the endgame.

The endgame should be that what I've got is a unified way of getting these various operations connected, so that my management picture has a straight flow through from the automated things that its kicked off. As those automated events occur, I'm getting a single, unified view of the results in my management view, which is, nine times out of ten, not the world we have when we look at big, big enterprise delivery. It is still a series of point tools, with maybe Excel laid over the top to try to unify it all.

Gardner: It sounds as if this is a natural maturation of IT, perhaps along the lines that we have seen with other aspects of business functions over the past 50 or even 100 years. Is that the case now? We are simply letting IT grow up, going beyond a dark art or a mysterious craft, to more of a regular recurring but dependable IT and/or business function?

Hipps: I think that's the case. It's funny, because for those of us who have been in software, grown up in software, there is always a temptation to hold ourselves as being on the cutting edge of everything and the sophisticated leaders of how work gets done.

Older and humbler

As I get older, I'm a little more humbled. If you want to understand the future of IT, you just need to look at where manufacturing has come. We've plagiarized the lion’s share of what we do in IT and the way we work a lot from what we have seen in manufacturing and mechanical engineering. That extends to lean methods. It starts probably all the way back to waterfall.

Maybe it's no surprise that when you ask us to talk about what you mean by integrated management and automation, we are borrowing an analogy from the world of mechanical engineering. We're talking about what planes can do, what ships can do, and what cars can do. So, I hope this is very much a natural advancement.

Sarbiewski: I talk about it to customers and I talk about the industrialization of IT. Sometimes, there's a little pushback on that, because it feels heavy. Then, I say, "Wait a minute. Think about how flexible Toyota or Boeing is." These companies have these very complex undertakings and yet can manage parts and supplies for providers and partners from every corner of the world, and every other car can be different coming off that assembly line. Look at how quickly they have shrunk their product lifecycles from design to a finished model.

Part of what's done that is exactly what Brad was talking about, an enormous investment in understanding the process and optimizing that, in supporting the various stakeholders, whether it's through design software, or automation on the factory line, all of that investment. We didn't do in IT. We built it ourselves. We used Excel and post-it notes and other things, and we created from scratch everything that we have done, because we can, because we made it easy to do that. We have made it easy to design and build it a thousand different ways.

There is this counterintuitive perception that because there is an infinite number of ways, we hold ourselves to be different than that. People are realizing that's not really the case. In fact, the more I can industrialize and keep it lean and agile, how I do this, the tools I use, if I give the people incredible tools to do it, and not just point tools but integrated, the results really speak for themselves.

They have essentially industrialized their approach, they have integrated their approach, they support their stakeholders with great technology, and they adopt to change their process.

When we talk to customers that have done this, they achieve incredible results in three critical dimensions. There's a very longstanding joke that you can't go faster, you can't raise quality and take cost down. It's not just possible. This is this impenetrable triangle or it’s squeezing a balloon. We see with our customers that you absolutely can.

They have essentially industrialized their approach, they have integrated their approach, they support their stakeholders with great technology, and they adopt to change their process. Guess what, they go faster, they take cost down, they drive quality up.

Gardner: I'm afraid we have to leave it there. You've certainly piqued my interest in this book. We've been examining how the shifting applications landscape is providing a huge opportunity for improving how applications are built, consumed, and managed. You need to use these new ALM methods and concepts to get to that point, move beyond the old, because the gap is deep between what had been norm and what’s the new norm.

I want to thank our guests. We have been here with Mark Sarbiewski. He is the Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and also Brad Hipps, Product Marketing Manager for HP Applications. Thanks to you both.

Hipps: Thank you.

Sarbiewski: Thank you.

Gardner: This is the first in the series of three podcasts on ALM. We are examining a new book, The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, and it’s one that offers methods as well as means to overall business services delivery improvement.

Our next podcast examines how an enterprise, Delta Airlines, has moved successfully to improve its applications quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from those applications. We will hear their story from two Delta IT executives and get the reactions to the new book's findings.

Our final podcast underscores the conclusions from the book and explains how other organizations can begin to change how they deliver and maintain applications in a fast changing world.

We hope you can join us for the rest of our series, and we hope you can get a chance to get the book and examine it in more detail.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You have been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, the first in a series discussing a new book on ALM and it's goal of helping businesses become change ready. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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HP's Instant-On Enterprise Initiative Takes Aim at Shifting Needs of Business and Government

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on addressing users' and customers' expectations for an always-on environment.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP. Learn more.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect. Thanks for joining this sponsored podcast discussion on the impact that rapidly evolving customer, citizen, and user expectations are having on the enterprise.

We’ll be looking at how technology advancements are making it possible to drive innovation to meet these new demands for instant gratification.

There are three megatrends shaping the next generation of successful businesses and governments. We're talking about pervasive mobile applications, highly responsive cloud-computing models, and knowledge-adept social collaboration.

Indeed, by the year 2020, The Economist newspaper predicts there will be two trillion devices connected to the Internet. And taking a look at where we are right now, McKinsey Quarterly reported in August that in 2010 some four billion people have cell phones, and 450 million have access to a full web experience.

Moreover, Jupiter Research reports that by 2014 there will be 130 million enterprise users involved with mobile cloud activities. Not only is access pervasive, but the amount of information available is also exploding. The Economist reports that in 2005 mankind created 150 exabytes of digital data … and in 2010 we will create fully eight times more data.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

As these trends literally rearrange business ecosystems, a gap will surely emerge between the companies that master change -- and exploit enabling technologies -- and those that fall ever further behind.

For those that do step up to the challenge -- expect a relentless emphasis on rapidly recurring innovation to meet dynamic customer and citizen demands.

We're here to explore these issues, and to better understand how HP is working to help customers make headway, so that the next few years bring about a generational opportunity -- and not a downward complexity spiral.

Here now to discuss HP’s vision and game plan for success on attaining and mastery of the Instant-On Enterprise is Dave Shirk, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at HP Enterprise Business.

Welcome, Dave.

Dave Shirk: Thank you, Dana. Happy to be here.

Gardner: I mentioned a few trends, and clearly we're into a stage here beyond business as usual. There are clearly some changes. How do you see these trends? Are there several that you're focusing on now that you think really represent an opportunity, or even something that needs to be managed in terms of risk?

Shift in the marketplace

Shirk: We're seeing a lot of shift going on in the marketplace right now. When we look at where consumers are driving business or where citizens are driving government, it's fundamentally changing the way they operate. We've seen three core things come out, similar to some of the pieces that you talked about.

One of those is just the business model. The business models are all starting to change the way in which people approach markets across the globe. That's having to really rethink the ways in which they've approached them versus traditional methods.

The second thing we see is this whole shift in mobile computing meeting cloud computing and the enterprise trying to figure out exactly how to take best advantage of that to create this competitive advantage. Then, the overall demographic piece weighs into that.

We've seen the rise of the millennials, as they're being referred to. All of these things are forcing business and government to stop and say, "You know what, if we're going to grow or we're going to create a service differentiation, we're really going to need to do things differently and we're going to have to do it way faster than we've ever done it before."

This is probably best represented in the words of Professor Gary Hamel, who is the foremost business visionary person out there in the marketplace. In his book, Future of Management, he described it as "whiplash change."

That's very much the case when I speak with our clients both on the business side and the government side. That's exactly what they're sitting there and thinking and working through right now. These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

Gardner: And, the role of IT in this needs to be more than simply a speed bump -- something that slows things down. IT needs to shift into more of a high-gear cooperative partnership, accelerating impact on the business. So, how does technology fit into this?

Shirk: We look at the technology piece of it and say that you really can't get there any other way -- the pace of it, the speed of it, and some of the complexity associated with it. For a long time, business has tried to use labor as an arbitrage to try to work their way through this and just throw bodies at it. That's quickly dissipating. The speed and the connectedness that we see, and the confidence level that all of these types of services require make it no longer possible to go through that.

What we see is IT completely embedded in the business. Over the next couple of years, that's going to continue to be the trend and the strategy that will play out in the way in which business and government work this. Ultimately, that's going to be the differentiator that drives an ability not only to serve these constituencies but to out-serve them, and that's going to be the name of the game.

Gardner: This gets us to that element of the workforce, younger folks and, in particular, folks in emerging markets, where they've always been more focused on mobile devices than perhaps a traditional PC. They're the ones that I suppose are driving this change, because to them it’s not changing, it's their norm.

Part of the workforce

Shirk: It's absolutely the case, if you look around the world at the quantity of graduates, for example. According to the Society for Engineers, you now have over 800,000 graduates in China, over 300,000 graduates in India, 100,000 some in Japan, etc. It's over the last 10 to 12 years that each of those graduation rates has occurred. They are part of the workforce now.

When they went through that process, they were always connected and they always were involved in a social network-based environment. They have a level of their lifestyle that is all tied to this always-connected environment. When you think about the ubiquitous computing that that has brought to them, as they enter the workforce, they are looking at things a lot differently than ever before.

They bring new ideas. They bring new ways to that. They're looking for businesses that will support that kind of methodology and structure. They're looking for ways in which technology is used in a whole slew of new avenues to innovate and drive new business models and to drive new products and offerings in the marketplace. They want to be a part of that. So, when we think about that Gen X group that's out there, we see them driving an enormous part of this change.

The last statistic I saw was that they are now over 50 percent of the workforce. The analogy that's always used is that, to them, being connected and always involved in some type of networking-based collaboration or information sharing of some sort is about the same as it is for you and me to pick up our remote controls and turn on our television sets. That's already having a very profound effect on how business and government are changing and the expectations that are out there in the marketplace.

Gardner: Right. It's the expectations of the younger folks, and we are not talking about kids, but basically people under 35. They’ve been developed through their careers with an always-on mentality, and so their expectations are for their governments and their providers of services and products, even their employers, to be much quicker and more direct. If they can't find it there, they know that they can go somewhere else. So, the expectation is for this always-on instant gratification. Is that part of what got you into this notion of an Instant-On Enterprise?

Shirk: Yeah, it's a big part of it. The always on is very important in the backdrop that’s there. As you pointed out, it's this immediate or instant gratification. If I can't get what I want in the following way, I’ll find the business or government environment where I can. While the government piece maybe a bit harder to change, the business piece isn't, and so the competitive pressure to serve this audience, both as the consumer and also as employees, is a big part of that shift.

We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

We call that the "Now Problem." They want this, they want it done now, and they want it to work a certain way. We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

Gardner: If you’re an enterprise or a government, you’re large, and a lot of what you have in place has been put there over a period of 20 or maybe 30 years, or more. There's a disconnect between the requirements that you had to rely on and these different expectations from your workforce, consumers, and a dynamic, changing business environment. How do we convert to Instant-On? How do we recognize that business as usual, IT as usual, isn't quite up to the task?

Shirk: First, it starts with a desire to change and to drive innovation in a different way. We sit and we think about the fundamental change in this. We talked for years that the business was focused on business processes and business process reengineering. While that’s still very important, it isn't going to go away any time soon.

It's becoming obvious that the bigger driver and the more significant trend is the information process, understanding the segments of business or government that need to be addressed. What their needs are, what they want, what they want to talk about, the ways in which they want to interact is all part of this change that’s taking place.

Closing the gap

So, as we start to pull back and step back from this, we look at that and we look at this vision that we have for the Instant-On Enterprise and how we’re enabling end-users to become a part of that, how we’re enabling businesses and governments to provide that type of capability. It really is about closing the gap between what IT can provide and what the business needs to be able to serve each of those audiences.

It's a big part of the solution capability and the path that we’ve been trying to go down in the marketplace. What we’ve launched with this vision is to put the foundations in place to make that possible and take a journey with our clients both from the business side and government side and help them move down that particular path, find ways to navigate these challenges and these trends, and to out-serve and to over-serve all the audiences that they need to meet the needs of.

Gardner: Dave, when I was looking into the Instant-On Enterprise, looking at some research for this discussion, I saw that you’re trying to do enablement around innovation, agility, optimization, and then managing risk. It struck me that this is very ambitious, especially if you try to do those all at once. Do we have any choice? Is this something that we have as a "nice to have" or is this really challenging and daunting, but inevitable?

Shirk: You're right. It is inevitable. Different businesses and governments will have, at different times, one of these four elements be more important or more significant to them at different points. All of them share the innovation requirement. We see that in all things.

A lot of folks confuse innovation with ideation. Our view is that the innovation has to take place throughout that information process. It doesn’t matter whether it happens back at the data center or at every touch point. Innovation has to take place throughout for the business to meet the needs of those segments I’ve referred to earlier -- how it services it, how it conducts itself, and ultimately how it meets our needs or exceeds the needs of the audiences.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used.

Agility, optimization, and risk all vary in and out with innovation in terms of their need and their level of importance. It's hard today to hide from risk. Fundamentally, we can't eliminate it, but are we in a position that we can manage it. Can we use it to our advantage to differentiate ourselves and understand how to navigate within security threats, the regulations, and the data and information sources that are coming through?

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used. A big part of technology’s trouble in the past was that we created all of these things and we never had a plan for ending their lifecycle or turning them down slightly, so that we could turn up other activities or other possibilities in an instant-on environment and an instant-on enterprise. A core part of the vision that we see is being able to drive that agility to meet those changing business needs.

Gardner: It sounds very rational and necessary, but for those folks trying to really grasp this vision, are there some examples? Are there some poster-children organizations of which you can say, "They’re doing it. They’re gaining the results that we expect and now others can follow their lead." Do you have any bellwethers for us?

Shirk: There are a few examples. I’ve had interactions with a number of CIOs, CTOs, and CEOs. One of those that comes to mind very quickly is the insurance industry. There is a particular insurance company that’s been out there for years, and years, and years.

They have been a bedrock. It’s a household name. You’d look at them and say that they totally built the business and the business model on a dealer or agent network and that is the interaction point between the consumer and ultimately their products and services.

Competitive threat

They’ve been cranking along very successfully for years. All of a sudden, they met with a competitive threat, where another company has come along and has almost disintermediated the agent channel with an entire set of online and mobile-based applications that interacts right to the consumer, when the consumer wants and how they want.

So, this company finds itself in a situation as an insurance provider, where it literally is reinventing the way in which it plays in that industry by using technology to shift from that traditional model to a hybrid approach of both the agent being important and this whole set of self-service applications. That’s an example where the fundamental competitive threat is there.

Another example where we’ve had some very interesting success is a large company that provides warranty services. Again, it's another household name. They have an offering in which they traditionally provided warranty services as a third-party provider to a lot of other companies in the marketplace.

One of the things that they wanted to do was take that traditional process, which is very phone- and service-center based, and find a way to move the claims processing and that model to a whole new set of applications online and drive that environment forward. As a result, they watched the registrations that they had skyrocket by 500 percent. The online product registrations -- which is always the Holy Grail for up-sell and cross-sell for any company -- they watched that go from a 15 percent level to a 99 percent level.

As a result of those changes and using technology to meet the needs of the end-user community that they were trying to serve, they’ve put themselves in a situation now where a lot more business has come their way from a number of companies that use them to fulfill their warranty services.

HP looks at the Instant-On Enterprise, the enablement of that is really a journey, and we’ve got to figure out what pieces make the most sense.

It's another example where we’ve seen that kind of change take place pretty prolifically in the marketplace.

Gardner: Again, while I was researching your Instant-On Enterprise initiative, you expect that IT needs to become more flexible, secure with added speed to what they do, leveraging automation, and providing not just function but the insight to their constituents, to their business brethren.

But, at the same time, it also strikes me that IT is operating with millstones around their necks, as they try to adapt and take on these more fleet characteristics. There are aging applications. There are unknown threats within the existing infrastructure. They are looking at development and deployment strategies and processes that are dated, perhaps linear, perhaps sequential, and with this rigid infrastructure, not to mention the fact that many of them are fighting fires around data explosion and trying to manage helpdesk and other types of remedial activity.

So, how do we do this? How do we change the wings in the airplane while we're flying, without crashing?

Shirk: We're faced with this all the time. That's partially why I say that when HP looks at the Instant-On Enterprise, the enablement of that is really a journey, and we’ve got to figure out what pieces make the most sense. There are some things that are much easier to focus on first and then, over time, to gain more and more of an Instant-On nature.

Critical success factors

When you mentioned flexibility, security, speed, automation, and insight, those absolutely are attributes that we look for. We see them as the critical success factors in the way in which every part of the environment that IT leverages, drives, and embeds in the business has to come forward.

And yet, as you point out, everybody is stuck in this mode of an enormous legacy that they have to deal with, and that gets in the way of being able to provide some of these new capabilities.

The challenge in all of these, as I said, is where you start first. Our view is that we work with our clients and figure out ways that they can, as we say, shift that equation. How do you shift from 70 percent of that equation being focused on operational management, and 30 percent, if you are lucky, being spent on new and innovation-based capabilities to help or assist the business and its growth versus shifting it the other way? How do you get to 30 percent operational mode, and move forward with 70 percent focused on the business?

We help our clients work their way through that with a series of workshops that we do to get in and investigate. We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

We’ve spent a lot of time and gotten a lot of expertise over the years trying to figure out the best ways to do that and address these albatrosses that are keeping IT from being able to deal with the needs of the business. In the Instant-On Enterprise journey, that's a big part of the set of steps that we have to work through and work with our clients to make sure that they understand where to prioritize.

In the first few months that I have been here, one of the things that I've learned is that HP, as a company, has this incredible breath and depth of portfolio.

Gardner: This also strikes me as a rather fresh perspective, particularly for a technology provider like HP. Many times we hear, "Here's what the technology is capable of and here is what you can do with it." But, you seem to be coming from the perspective of, "Here’s what the customers need. Let's re-engineer and back up from that."

It's sort of a fresh perspective. You've been at HP since April and you’ve had a chance to look deeply into the company, back up, and rearrange some thinking. Perhaps you could walk me through that process. How did you get to this point of Instant-On Enterprise, vis-à-vis customer needs?

Shirk: A lot of this has to do with just spending time with our clients and understanding their viewpoint. In the first few months that I have been here, one of the things that I've learned is that HP, as a company, has this incredible breath and depth of portfolio.

We're in a unique position, because we're the only company in the marketplace that has a full suite of consumer products, and yet we stretch all the way back through to the data center. All the capability, all the offerings, that are in between, all the services that are necessary to address each of those pieces, are contained inside the portfolio capability that HP has of hardware, software, and services.

Changing business models

When I spend time with clients and listen to them, a big part of what they're asking for is, "We’ve got these pressures. We're seeing the business models change and we're experimenting with some things. We're seeing the mobile and the cloud computing pieces coming at us like a freight train. At the same time, we're seeing the demographic shift both on the end-user consumer side and on our employee side. We need strategic partners to help us with this. How do we navigate this? What is the way in which we should do that? HP, do you have a point of view?"

So, as we stepped back and looked at where we would want to go with this, we thought that a big part of this is coming to the marketplace and sharing a strategy and a vision for where we would like the clients that we work with to end up and what that destination looks like and how we're going to get them there.

We looked at this and said, "How do we take the best combination of that breadth of portfolio and bring those together in a set of solutions to best address what we are hearing over-and-over from some of the research that we’ve done and listening that we’ve done with our clients?"

They need to figure out how to modernize their applications. We want to make sure that we are there and we’ve got a set of solutions for that. They’ve got huge data-center issues in terms of how they're going to transform their data centers and deal with more virtualization-based techniques and capabilities and bring networking and storage and compute power together in some fashion.

They’ve got this issue of enterprise security. They need to figure out how to secure the enterprise. I don’t mean desktops, but all points, all touch points of the enterprise -- how they build applications, how this information is accessed inside and outside of the organization, and then fundamentally optimizing that information, the ways in which you store it, the way in which you deliver it, the way in which you print it for that matter, all those pieces.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

Then, they need to underpin that by the best way to figure out how to deliver it. Do we do it for them? Do they build it themselves with our architecture, and our capability set, and our consulting expertise? What combination of ways makes the most sense to set that up?

I looked at all of that and listened to the clients. There are some really rich stories that were shared with me. As we pulled all the stuff together, this is the underpinning of that capability, trying to push HP’s leadership in the marketplace through all the work that it’s been doing and then set this vision and destination where we really want to try to take our clients.

Gardner: Let’s come back in more detail to some of the news that you’ve made around the Instant-On Enterprise. You’re talking about hybrid delivery benefits. I wonder if we could just briefly get into those. What does that bring to the table? How would that help an organization start moving and transitioning to gain the attributes that we’ve been describing today?

Shirk: Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

There’s an enormous amount of talk about cloud in the marketplace today. HP has been at the forefront of that, but we have a little different position. We think it’s unique and we think we're the only ones out there that are really positioned to do this, which is the concept of hybrid IT, where you’ve got a mix. You’ve got a mix of traditional on-premises-based capabilities, but then you figure out what private cloud or public cloud-based capabilities best serve your business on a global basis.

HP comes in and, unlike other companies that try to force you into a one-size-fits-all structure, we sit down with the client. Our unique IP in this area is that we have an incredible depth of intellectual capital in this particular area, which is helping the clients figure out the best balance or mix of the delivery methods.

We can help them build it. They can host it or we can host it for them. We can provide those services from our public cloud-based capabilities or from our private cloud based capabilities. We really don’t care, if that blend changes over time. That’s the beauty to the journey to this Instant-On Enterprise.

Starting small

Our data says that most customers still start with a small private cloud implementation to really understand the value of the cloud and demystify it. We’ve said that there is going to be something after cloud. We don’t know what that level or that style of computing is going to be, but our architecture is built such that we’ll be ready for that. For our clients, we’ll help navigate them through each of these pieces, and that’s the important thing for us.

Gardner: For those interested in pursuing more and understanding about Instant-On and the HP approach to these problems, is there an HP enablement process? Is there a way to get started with some resources?

Shirk: All of the above. There are a number of materials that we’ve made available to help begin the education process for folks who are interested in understanding a bit more about the Instant-On Enterprise and how to take or begin that journey. That’s one piece.

The other piece is that we have a whole series of workshops globally that our teams are set up to do, everything from a small couple-of-hour based interaction to a full suite of in-depth analysis and consulting engagements to work with a client. But, we usually recommend that one of our newly announced services would be the starting point.

We’ve got our new HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service, which is a place for a client to start, get a basic orientation, sit down and understand kind of where we think they might consider beginning that journey. So that, along with a number of other capabilities that we have to help them through these various workshops, I think is really the best place for them to start.

Gardner: Well, we’ve been talking about how some of the mega-trends of the day, cloud, mobile, social, Gen X have been buffeting organizations and how the speed of business is accelerating, and IT needs to play a bigger role in keeping up with the speed and isn't slowing the organization down. We’ve been talking about how HP has defined the Instant-On Enterprise as the means to start ameliorating these problems and setting up organizations for opportunity, rather than disappointment.

We’ve been discussing this here today with Dave Shirk. He is the Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at HP Enterprise Business. Thanks for joining us, Dave.

Shirk: I appreciate it, Dana. Thank you for the time.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You’ve been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: HP. Learn more.

You may also be interested in:

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Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on addressing users' and customers' expectations for an always-on environment. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

Why HTML5 Enables More Businesses to Deliver More Apps to More Mobile Devices With Greater Ease

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on using the latest HTML standard to provide a richer user experience on smartphones.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Genuitec. Learn more.

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 rapidly changing and fast-growing opportunity for more businesses to reach their customers and deliver their services via mobile applications.

Over just the past two years, the demand for mobile applications on more capable classes of devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has skyrocketed. Now businesses of all sizes are seeing a step change in how they can get into the action.

The means to deliver low-cost applications to these newer devices via app stores and communities also makes the case for small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) to reevaluate their application development and end-user access strategies. This goes for reaching employees, as well as partners, users, and customers.

Perhaps the most impactful element of this shift is that the skills required to put these applications on these devices and distribute them widely is moving from hardcore coders with mastery of embedded platforms and tools to more mainstream graphical and scripting-skilled workers, more power-users than developers.

We're here to discuss how mobile application development and the market opportunity are shifting, and how more businesses can quickly get into the mobile applications game and build out new revenue, share more data, and provide better direct customer access in the process.

Please join me in welcoming our panel on discovering some new opportunities for mobile computing. We're here with Roger Entner, Senior Vice President and Head of Research and Insights in the Telecom Practice at the Nielsen Co. Welcome, Roger.

Roger Entner: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: We are also here with Wayne Parrott, Vice President for Product Development at Genuitec. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, Wayne.

Wayne Parrott: Great to be back.

Gardner: Roger, let's go to you first. What is a salient difference now with mobile applications than just a couple years ago? How has this really changed in your eyes, and in your practice?

More computing power

Entner: Well, the devices that we call now smartphones are little computers that today are as powerful as laptops a few years ago. I always say that this little thing you have in your hands, a smartphone, has far more computing power than was used by NASA to put men safely on the moon and bring them back alive.

So, it is the Internet and a computer in the palm of your hand. This really has opened up the whole universe for app development, because you have now all three components. You have the right devices with the ability to provide the right services on the right networks. You have lot of power on the device, a large screen, a good way to input it, and the programming capabilities to do something really neat with the networks to provide a really fast connection.

This is a very nice confluence of factors that have led to this explosion in the palm of your hand called the smartphone.

Gardner: I suppose the form factor here is also changing the very nature of the applications. We're not simply re-purposing desktop applications for these devices. We're actually creating new ways that people can relate to business processes, discovery of data and information, and then join that with such aspects as location services.

Entner: Absolutely. A few years ago, it was a stamp-size screen, and people were trying to pack a 16, 18-inch experience from the laptop or from the computer onto that. It just fell short. It was a recipe for disaster, and people were simply not using it, and you can't blame them for it.

One of the biggest innovations Apple brought was addressing the elasticity of demand.

Now, we have 3- and 4-inch screens that are actually readable. We're not just merely replicating a desktop experience, but actually tailoring it to the device and working with the strengths of the device rather than with the weaknesses.

Gardner: I'm also impressed too with how the business model has shifted so rapidly. People used to want to make money off the application. Now, we're seeing through app stores with Apple devices and Android devices, as well as Microsoft upgrades to their new operating system on the mobile device, a premium model, where [enterprises and smaller businesses] either give-away the app or charge quite a low amount. So, that’s sort of increased this viral uptake of these apps.

Entner: One of the biggest innovations Apple brought was addressing the elasticity of demand. On feature phones today you're still paying $3, $4, $5, $6, $7 for an application, and it has an inferior experience than the one that companies are selling on the iPhone. To no surprise, they actually make a lot more money through the iPhone, because of a lower price point and better experience. A lot more people are buying it than those with an inferior experience.

Gardner: Do you have any studies at your fingertips? We've seen a lot going around recently around these projections of growth for mobile. In many cases, it's really a shift away from PC. A lot of developers are saying, "Wow, I can make a better living making these mobile devices and having that high volume opportunities." Are there any numbers, any projections?

Entner: We're quite active in the mobile applications arena. We just launched our second edition of our Mobile Apps Playbook. But to quote numbers from there, year-over-year second quarter '09 to second quarter '10, smartphone penetration in the US went from 16 percent to 25 percent.

About 50 percent of all devices being sold in the US right now are smartphones. We expect smartphone penetration to be at about 50 percent by the end of next year. Almost 60 percent of smartphone owners are actually using applications. That’s a huge percentage.

At the sweet spot

We're now at that sweet spot, where it makes a lot of sense for businesses to have applications both for their consumers and their employees alike, because there is enough of an addressable base there.

Gardner: The interesting part too for me is that this can scale down as well as up. That is to say, individuals, small businesses, maybe even departments within large companies can start thinking about making their own apps for their own services, because the economics have shifted so dramatically.

Entner: Absolutely. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the others, have software development kits (SDKs) out there that make app development a lot easier than it has ever been.

If you have a talented developer or a talented person in your department, he might be able to build that internally. Or, there are now myriad development shops out there that have the capabilities to build applications and charge only a few thousand dollars -- and that's single digit thousand dollars -- to have a capable usable application.

There are a lot more people who know how to program these things, and have good ideas of applications. There is a really good market out there to put the two together.

Gardner: Wayne, Genuitec has been focused on development and the developer community for a number of years. Is there anything from what Roger has been telling us that you don’t see? How are you at Genuitec seeing this shift in developer community and interest around mobile apps?

Parrott: We’re seeing a big move toward interest in mobile at the development side. Back to your original question of what are the factors that’s really led to the explosion of mobile apps, is not only the smartphones and their capabilities, but we also look at the social changes in terms of behavior.

People more and more have a higher reliance on their smartphone and how they run their lives, whether they are at work or on the move. The idea is that they are always connected. They can always get to the data that they need.

Basically, we're taking their lifestyle away from their desktop and putting it in their pocket as they move around. More and more, we see companies wanting to reach out and provide a mobile presence for their own workforce and for their customers.

The question they ask is, "How do we do that? We already have a web presence. People have learned about our brand, but they can't access this through their smartphones, or the experience is inferior to what they’ve come to expect on the smartphone."

We're seeing a big growth of interest in terms of just getting on to the mobile -- having a mobile presence for the SMBs.

Gardner: I forgot to consider that if you could become adept with consumer and entertainment applications, they'd want to start seeing that same opportunity for mobility in their business applications. It's almost as if business needs to rapidly catch up to where the entertainment side or even gaming side is. Let's talk a little bit about some of the technologies that support these user interfaces (UIs).

Roger, any sense of any game changing technology shifts? We're certainly talking about the skills moving. I am aware of HTML5 and some other SDK activities. What strikes you as sort of in an important technology shift that is now going to help bring together these communities and this interest?

Trend on both sides

Entner: Well, you have a trend on both sides. One is HTML5, which is slowly but surely approaching. There has been no finalized HTML5 standard [from the W3C], but a lot of web browsers, and even mobile web browsers, have now some HTML5 capabilities. And, it will really help in the development cycle for basic applications.

If we take one little step back, one of the genius things that Apple has done is turn the bookmarks into an application. About 60-70 percent of all applications on the iPhone or an Android are actually glorified HTML ports. So, it's not that difficult or that demanding on the application side.

Where HTML5 will not to be able to help us, at least right now, is when we try to take advantage of location-based services because there is no standard yet. They're still arguing about this one, and especially high performance graphics. But, on the standard application, HTML5 will take us miles forward and diminish the difference between the desktop and the mobile environment.

Then, we have a multi-platform development environments. Adobe Flash is probably the most well-known, and that helps to reduce development time as well. At the same time, all of the SDKs are getting more powerful and more user-friendly. So, it's moving toward a more harmonized and more rapid development environment.

Gardner: Wayne, how about that harmonization process? It doesn’t seem that long ago that mobile development was really hard. It was highly fractured, with many different platforms, many different toolsets, and concerns about network compatibility. The problem was that you had to target specific OSes, and therefore one app wouldn't run somewhere else, or the graphics wouldn't quite fit. So this harmonization and standardization seems to me a fairly big deal?

You still see a strong fragmented programming model base, different operating systems, and different hardware capability. It's still a mess.

Parrott: Absolutely. If you take a look at the current state of native mobile app development, it's really not much better than it was five years ago. You still see a strong fragmented programming model base, different operating systems, and different hardware capability. It's still a mess. You pretty much have to pick a subset of devices that you want to focus on.

What's much more viable now, as Roger was talking about, is the HTML5 standard, which is still in development and emerging. There is enough core already emerging that we could start to program to a subset of that spec and treat it as kind of a common run-time that you would program across pretty much all of the new emerging smartphones as we look forward.

Gardner: Maybe we should back up a sec for our listeners who are in SMBs and who aren't coders or developers. HTML5 is a web-type mark-up language, something that they would be familiar with looking at through their browser. What's changed? What does this mean now for going to a hand-held tablet mobile device of some sort? Wayne, maybe you could take a first stab at that.

Parrott: Prior to HTML5 talking about mobile web was pretty much a joke. Mobile web was an afterthought in the phone market. You had these small, dinky displays. Most of them couldn't even render most standard HTML.

With the advent of the smartphone what you really saw was pretty much the Internet, as you experience it on your desktop, now on to your smartphone, but with even more capability.

Part of it is because HTML5 has stepped back and looked at what the future needed to be for a web programming model. To become more of a common run-time, they had to address some of the key gaps between native hardware, APIs, and web. Much of those have really centered on one of the biggest digs that mobile web had in the old days, when you were doing something, were connected, and then you lost your connectivity.

Out of the box

HTML5, right out of the box, has a specification for how to operate in an online, offline, or disconnected type mode. Another thing was a rendering model, beyond just what you see on your desktop, that actually provides a high-end graphics type capability -- 2D, 3D types of programming. These are things that more advanced programs can take advantage of, but you can build very rich desktop type of experiences on the laptop.

Then, they went beyond what you're used to seeing on your desktop and took advantage of some of the sensors that these phones have now -- accelerometers, location capability, or geolocation. APIs are now emerging as a companion to HTML5, which is a spec that will span across your desktop to the mobile phone. It's a very capable specification.

In addition, there is the movement in terms of the standards body, especially the W3C, to address mobile device API. You will eventually program in a standard way and talk to your contacts list, your cameras, video, recording devices, and things like that. That will soon be available to us in a web programming model.

What used to be exclusively the demand of the hardware API guys to do really low level, high performance bit twiddling is now going to be available to the general web programming masses. That opens up the future for a lot more innovation than what we’ve seen in past.

Gardner: Roger, you pointed out that this HTML5 is not fully baked, but there are some very powerful big players involved who are supporting it. That would include Apple and Google. Is this a question of if HTML5 becomes dominant or pervasive, or is it a matter of when?

HTML5 will come, and the excitement that you see is expressed by so many companies.

Entner: It's only a matter of when and a little bit around the edges of how. HTML5 will come, and the excitement that you see is expressed by so many companies. Apple and Google are at the forefront and are already launching websites and services in it. You can get HTML5 YouTube, HTML5 Google, and even Yahoo mail access. You can have the Apple website in HTML5. It just depends on what is fully supported right now.

Some browsers support it, and some don't yet. On the mobile side, it also fully depends on what is supported. If you have the WebKit engine at the core of the browser that your device is using, HTML5 is pretty widely supported. If your browser uses another engine, it's a little bit more difficult.

We're at the moment of emergence of this, and so the implementation is not fully baked, but there is so much excitement that people want to get going rather than wait for the standards to be finalized.

Gardner: I think it's important with these devices and their interfaces, especially the tablet. People are looking to video and full media as a way of doing more than simply watching the news. This is really becoming part of our culture, the way people relate, taking steps from social media. The thing with HTML5 is that it supports that video without the plug-ins, without worrying about compatibility. This kind of levels the playing field on the full media. Is that your take as well, Wayne?

Parrott: Absolutely. Definitely.

Innovative model

Gardner: So, the goal here is to make this available to more people and more companies. There is a very interesting, innovative model potential here for small companies or, as I said, divisions within companies, branch offices, perhaps by geography. You don't have to go through IT and get into a long line waiting for development of an application. The office, perhaps in another geography or language environment could go out, create their own mobile app, and reach their customers very quickly that way.

Let's get back to this notion of simplified creation, design, and deployment. Wayne, what have you been doing with MobiOne in Genuitec, in particular, to try to hasten this to take advantage of this need in the market?

Parrott: We've been watching HTML5 and the whole movement -- the social desire across a number of small businesses to be on the mobile web, to have a web presence out there. As we've talked to more-and-more of our SMBs, one thing that stands out is that they don't have a lot of resources. They don't have a huge web department. Their personnel wear a number of hats. Web development is just one of n things that one of the individuals may do in one of these organizations.

At Genuitec, we developed a product called MobiOne Studio. The target user is anyone who has an idea or an vision for a mobile web application or website. MobiOne is geared to provide a whole new intuitive type of experience, in which you just draw what you want. If you can develop PowerPoint presentations, you can create a mobile web application using MobiOne.

You lay out your screens, you pane them all up, and then you wire them together with different types of transitions. From there, you can then immediately generate mobile web code and begin to test it either in the MobiOne test environment, that's an emulated type of HTML5 environment, or you can immediately deploy it through MobiOne to your phone and test it directly on a real device.

One of the challenges you have right now with HTML5 and the mobile web programming model is that it is typically not accepted in most of the app stores.

Gardner: And, Wayne, how would that then work toward some of these app stores and particular devices? How do you take that added step particularly, as you point out, these organizations are without a lot of resources? How would they get this out into the mainstream? What's the distribution and deployment next step?

Parrott: Well one of the challenges you have right now with HTML5 and the mobile web programming model is that it is typically not accepted in most of the app stores. Let's just talk about the Apple's App Store as an example. Mobile web applications in their straight HTML5 form are not accepted yet in the app store.

We expect to see that relaxed in the future, but at this point in time, you really are restricted. So, the iPhone App Store is not available to you. It's really restricted, so that you have to jump through some hoops that Apple has set up in the past.

With HTML5, you can go directly to your customers. You can market to them directly. It depends on your way of interacting with your customers, but we have seen a number of novel approaches already from some of our customers. When any customer is in your store, you make it very easy for them to access your site, to make them aware of your mobile capabilities, lure them in, and get them connected that way.

But looking beyond the restrictions you have right now, with MobiOne Studio we recognized that the first thing that most companies want to do is just mobilize, just get a mobile presence, mobilize their websites, and have that capability. As Roger said a while ago, a lot of the apps you see out there are really glorified mobile websites and are packaged up in a binary format.

Second phase

In MobiOne Studio's second phase, once you design and you like what you have, you have a progressive step that you can go from a very portable form to compile it down -- or cross-compile -- from HTML5 to whatever the native requirements are of that particular target app store. So, Google will have their app store, and Apple and RIM each has their own model. They are all fairly different models.

One last thing that we are keeping a really close eye on is the mobile widget standard. It basically specifies what a mobile web app looks like and what the packaging model is. That's already respected by RIM and some of the other smartphones out there. Apple doesn't support it yet, but, fingers-crossed, they'll join the masses at some point, and we'll have a standard packaging deployment model in the future for the iPhones as well.

We're keeping an eye on it and we're filling those gaps based on what your target app store is.

Gardner: We’ve already discussed how we've come a long way in reducing the fractionalization within the mobile side, but it sounds as if we're looking to join a bit more of what happens in the web experience on a full-fledged PC with what happens in the web experience on a mobile device.

Back to you, Roger. Do you see this actually merging in some way? One of the guesses out there at this point is that iOS is going to be a bit more compatible, that is to say, your experience on the desktop and the mobile device become more common. Is it your future outlook that these things are going to start not only to consolidate in the mobile space, but consolidate across all types of devices connected to the web?

Entner: Yes, because when we look at fourth generation networks, LTE or WiMAX, they are flat IP networks. When you look at that, it basically allows you to have the same service. Your user experience only changes with the terminal you added at the end and the speed of the connection.

With mobile it's mobility and location awareness, whereas with the PC, it will always be raw speed through fiber and storage capability and screen size.

What we're seeing now is this increasing trend of a harmonization or at least integration capability of different OSes with their mobile counterparts. Then you can have everything from the Internet -- and we've seen it already today -- to applications, even like IPTV, streamed to your device. Only the speed changes or impacts how quickly you get it and what kind of resolution there is. If you look at Uber’s mobile from AT&T, it is already providing that.

We're seeing this congruence that’s happening. You try to play to the strength of the device that you have. With mobile it's mobility and location awareness, whereas with the PC, it will always be raw speed through fiber and storage capability and screen size. You're going to increasingly tailor to the strengths of the devices, rather than do one size fits all.

Gardner: Back to you Wayne. This is an interesting outlook for the future, because as we have that congruence and harmonization between web experience across multiple devices, this really also simplifies what can be done by developers and designers in terms of exploring new innovative business models, intercepting business processes and data based on that, the optimum part of a process timeline or more milestones, rather than where you happen to be, where you have to be at certain device or to intercept.

That’s a long-winded way of saying, can we start to see designers and UI-focused developers or scripters now having much more of a role in how business applications and processes can be designed and even improve iteratively over time?

Back to the desktop

Parrott: Yes. The influence that we are seeing already from the smartphones back to the desktop. The expectation, the experience, in the past has been a desire to have kind of that rich feel user type of experience moved back over to the desktop. So, we're seeing some influence there already.

Also, if you look at what HTML5 presents, not only is it becoming a common runtime on the smartphones, but it also represents a very viable development model on the desktop as well.

It's a portable standard. It wasn't originally designed for smartphones -- smartphones just embraced it first. We're definitely expecting to see a lot more influence by parties in the past that were really more kind of downstream, when they were being brought in upfront to talk about what's possible, when you start looking at the flow and the interaction with users, because things are becoming much more about the user experience.

To keep users engaged on the desktop in the past, you could take your workforce, lock them down, and give them some kind of boring app. But, we're seeing the temperament change now, as people have learned what’s possible. We’re asking what’s possible on the business side as well.

Gardner: I can see where this could really flip the development market altogether, because I might want to primarily design and develop and target mobile classes of devices, and then make it easier for me to then support the full-fledged PC through an HTML5 browser.

We think HTML5 is really the entry point to changing and moving everybody over to pretty much a web ubiquity.

I also might start developing on the server as a more sophisticated, say Eclipse-level Java developer, and start making sure that I output in HTML5, almost primarily. Then, I can cut across these different environments, reduce complexity significantly, and start to maybe get more agile, more swift, in how I do my server-side development as well. Any thoughts on that, Wayne?

Parrott: Definitely. That’s one thing we expect to see down the road. Again, it’s going to take a while for it to run it's course, because there are so many other competing technologies that have the incumbent technologies, Java or Microsoft’s desktop technologies, but companies for a long time have wanted to see a more capable portable web type model. It’s just got so many more benefits and we think HTML5 is really the entry point to changing and moving everybody over to pretty much a web ubiquity.

It’s going to be all by HTML5 in the future, at least when you talk about the client side, the UI that users are going to interact with as we move forward.

Gardner: I am afraid, we have to wrap it up. This brings this full circle back to how dynamic this marketplace is. Last word to you, Roger Entner. Thinking about the opportunity here, is now the time for these small businesses, almost any kind of business, to rethink how they relate to their environment, their end users, and perhaps get a bit more aggressive in thinking about mobile as a real important part of their business.

Entner: Yes. Now, 25 percent of wireless users have smartphones in their hand, and that’s basically increasing to 50 percent by the end of 2011. Now we have that critical mass that allows companies still to have an early move or advantage. If the companies wait another year or two, they will be laggards in the market and their competition will probably have put something out already and gained a valuable lead over that. So, it’s now where they still can show that they are leaders in their segment, if they haven’t done anything yet.

Gardner: Wayne, if folks were interested in trying to learn more about HTML5, the difference between different devices and web development to ameliorate the complexity, MobiOne Studio, and some other technologies Genuitec is working on, what would you suggest they’re doing to get started?

Parrott: Yeah, I would suggest, visit the Genuitec.com site, you can find all about MobiOne, download it, try it out, it’s very intuitive, you just install it to spin it up. You immediately are in the process of building HTML5 mobile app that you can then test and deploy, send it to your friends.

Gardner: What’s your pricing model, do you have a premium model on that? How does that work?

Parrott: Right now it’s priced right at $99 per user.

Gardner: Very good. Well, we’ve been talking about mobile application development and the market opportunity and how that’s all shifting, and how more businesses can quickly get into mobile applications and start building out new revenue, data sharing, and business process values to just about any user, just about any place nowadays.

I want to thank our guests. We’ve been here with Roger Entner, Senior Vice President and Head of Research and Insights in the Telecom Practice at the Nielsen Co. Thanks so much, Roger.

Entner: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: We’ve also been joined by Wayne Parrott, Vice President for Product Development at Genuitec. Thanks, Wayne.

Parrott: Great being here today. Thank you.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Genuitec. Learn more.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on using the latest HTML standard to provide a richer user experience on smartphones. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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