Mobile World in Barcelona last month saw the launch of the first 128GB micro SD card. Yes, the little sub-thumbnail job for smart phones and cameras. Yet right now the catalogues are showing a very small number of notebooks and ultrabooks with solid state drives and most of those are still offering just that same 128GB capacity. At a price premium, of course. Amusingly, most of them have an SD card slot. Something somewhere in the market is out of synch.
Recent TechPro interviews elicited the view that naïve notions like universal operating systems or universal compatibility for web-connected devices will not happen because of the competition between the device manufacturers. The iPhone has genuine usability attractions, plus some undoubted design cachet, so consumers are attracted into the Walled Garden. The iPad is still the choice of the field sales pros, even if you can’t carry a spare battery for your next presentation or sales call. Unlike Android devices, which run on the kernel of a formerly open and free O/S.
But we digress before we begin, the salient point is that it is now more than time for CIOs and indeed everyone in ICT leadership to look hard at computing devices. Computing itself is doing fine. Today’s enterprise management and government and scientific systems and applications are already beyond the dreams of the Nineties. Big Data and Cloud, those two deceptively simple-sounding quasi-terms, at least serve to remind us that we are well into computing on demand and with superb analytical tools that are showing the path to something very like artificial intelligence. IBM’s Watson is morphing into a ‘Big Brain for hire’, although less fun than Pinky’s sidekick in the 90s Spielberg series.
Hardware development has been accelerating to match, from gazillion tera-flops computing to multi-terabyte data storage on the desktop. The sometimes official and occasionally clandestine photos we have of Google data centres, for instance, show rows of containers like an indoor shipping port. That rather suggests that expansion is potentially limitless, restricted only by the fibre trunk networks. In some jurisdictions one might add the price of land but that is hardly a concern to Google. Google is our example because it is now acknowledged (even by IBM) to be the largest designer and manufacturer of servers in the world. If it were in the server sales business, it might even be the technology leader. But then on the hardware side it has the wonderful freedom of pleasing only a single client.
There has been a continuing theme of ‘the consumerisation of ICT in business’ across all media in the last couple of years. In reality it is mostly about hand-held gadgets and the appealing Apps (which is, it must be remembered, a term for stripped down or light applications) that ensure their popularity. So that’s where the marketing hype is and indeed the extended adoption. But looked at very coldly this is not aimed at business and its users at all. That opening example, 128GB in a micro SD card while you would be hard put to find a laptop with a 256GB SSD as standard spec, suggests that ‘traditional’ technology is falling behind in terms of innovation and product variety.
What is happening is that the world and its ICT is being ‘consumerised’ while business and professional technology is retreating back on-premise or to the data centre. Far from enterprise ICT being consumerised, business is being forced to accept the use by employees of devices designed for personal consumers from the age of about 7 or 8 upwards. From that point of view, enterprise professional applications are actually being dumbed down in many respects.
“Let’s spell it out. From now on, the solutions will be soft. All computing is tending towards software-defined”
Now that’s clearly a bit unfair. For a start, we have to regard the human interface with corporate systems as very high in the priority and economic value table. Ease of use may be a tired sales mantra but like a lot of them it is boringly true. Another voice might timidly suggest that enterprise ICT was making very modest efforts to ‘consumerise’ its products until impelled by strong market forces to cooperate with the Web and smart handheld devices. Actually, let’s be bold. The Big Boys in enterprise software and systems were eventually dragged wriggling and muttering into today’s world. There are still outfits explaining that their systems are so sophisticated they do not lend themselves to virtualisation, much less smart phone Apps as a front end.
As for that old BYOD stuff, let’s stand back. The Y clearly indicates that the concern and the policy come from the employer side. ‘We save money by letting you Buy Your Own and allowing you to Use Your Own but then we have to invest in systems to ensure that all works properly and securely with our enterprise applications.’ It’s a bit feeble when you spin the thinking just a few degrees. ‘We would like to take full advantage of today’s mobility possibilities. In fact many of us want to be Mobile 21st Enterprises and all of that sort of thing. But a big obstacle is that staff are using all of these consumer devices and that they choose and buy themselves and it poses a challenge to our ICT and security.’
Right. There was a time when the organisation had to supply, maintain, replace and ensure secure and controlled connectivity for portable devices being used by staff. Wait a second: doesn’t that still often apply to laptops? Maybe that’s why there is such a scarcity of specs in the portable computer market. Except for gamers and movie geeks. Ah, consumers, bless them. Sure they’ll spend a fortune getting the best devices for what they want to do.
But to be fair yet again, unaccustomed as we would often like to be. It actually does not matter anymore. We often talk about cycles in ICT and yet manage to forget from time to time the equally cyclical realisation that ICT has many purposes, adds more every hour, and none of them have much to do with technology outside of the industry inside. Computing (still a good word) is and will always be about doing something or other using the technology, from information storage to shopping to high end astrophysics and galactic modelling.
At this stage of the cycle we are bringing the serious workloads back home in many ways, to on-premise and data centre hosted or cloud solutions. What we are distributing is personal computing and user access to corporate resources. That is more and more on portable devices, handheld or bigger. Much of the time the screen size is the determining factor rather than the device itself — spreadsheets on smart phones and all of that.
“The answer, and it must be inevitable, is to pressure for universal connectivity regardless of the internal specs of the device. The Web has managed universality, despite the early competition”
Let’s spell it out. From now on, the solutions will be soft. All computing is tending towards software-defined. Think about data. We have stuff on media from mainframe magnetic tapes through generations of Winchester (look it up) drives, tape in various formats, pocket media from 5.25” floppies to USB sticks to — this is where you came in — SSDs from that entry-level 128GB up to 2TB and more. But if the organisation were preserving the content as a matter of policy, a mainframe database from decades ago could have gone through generations of data formats and applications and be as readable and immediately accessible today as in the 60s. Soft is eternal, with due regard to format translation. Which today can be readily automated and is much less complex than Information Lifecycle Management and deduplication and all of those data storage challenges.
All computing reduces to five elements: the screen or other display, the user interface for control and input, the ‘computer,’ the data storage and the applications. The latter two are inherently soft, with a constant requirement for renewal before obsolescence. But software and data storage (and retrieval) are driven by market demands and technical innovation. Back to Big Data and analytics. Similarly the computing will be done by ever-improving kit following Moore’s Law. What is now back at the mainframe peak of its cycle is the form factor, which is in racks in the data centre. It disguises itself a lot of the time as a big fluffy mass but we’re not fooled.
So back to the ruling consumer classes. They love all sorts of devices, the very small like wristwatch devices and the very, very ‘bigger the better’ in television displays. The biggest home TV is currently 110” at time of going to press. Now there’s a screen for larger than life videoconferencing—and even more boring virtual appearances at shows and conferences by people who are too important to grace us with an actual presence. But hey, 110” would really spread a sheet, man. As for the wrist communicator beloved of science fiction in the classic days, welcome at last old friend.
The umpteen device formats and sizes are great, great fun and to be welcomed. So how should organisations cope? The answer, and it must be inevitable, is to pressure for universal connectivity regardless of the internal specs of the device. The Web has managed universality, despite the early competition between browsers, because if the browser could not display everything as well as and as fast as the competition it faded away. Why should remote corporate access and security be any different with mobile devices? All of that is software-defined and in fact the technical answers are largely already there in HTML 5 and protocols like HTTPS. If GS1 can devise and gain agreement on a global system for specific identification numbering of every man-made object on the planet, surely a universal interface and secure standard for mobile to base/base to mobile is possible for our smart ICT sector?
Come on Corporates, fight for your rights. The Consumer Liberation Army might even join in.
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