Jan 09 2006

Service outages (3)

Salesforce.com has suffered another service outage, but – according to Philip Wainewright – appears to have at least started to keep its users more informed.

At least the outages don’t stop people from extolling the virtues of Software as a Service (SaaS). I have just read an article, Software As A Service: Nightmare Or Dream Margins?, by Barbara Darrow on CRN, which gave a good account of how businesses are beginning the transition from being product-centric to providing SaaS, and looks at SaaS from the perspective of resellers and others.

It was striking that both Microsoft and IBM viewed the future as one in which different software models could co-exist.

Microsoft CTO Ray Ozzie wrote: “We believe that there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution environment—there are trade-offs in each choice. Businesses will select solution platforms based on their own mix of requirements such as mobility, cross-enterprise collaboration, structured process integration, quality of service, confidentiality, compliance, speed and, of course, cost.” A Microsoft partner said the company sees three delivery scenarios.

  1. The fat-client, thin-network world: where Office and Windows reign supreme, where people are not always connected via a broadband link, and where “knowledge workers” need a lot of local processing power and storage.
  2. The thin-client, fat-network scenario: with fast Web connections and server-based logic either in the cloud or on premises. There, browser-based software becomes the face of the application.
  3. And large companies that need to mix and match the two will be free to do so. Road warriors may be forced to depend on dial-up or wireless connections and so need both the rich client and the rich network at times.

Mike Rhodin at IBM Software agrees on the mixed-use worldview, segmenting the potential market into:

  1. the consumer-based model, where Microsoft Windows Live/Office Live would appear to fit, supported by advertising revenue and already pioneered by Google
  2. the more traditional “next-gen ASP” model that delivers Web-based services like Webex and Salesforce.com
  3. the outsourcing model where businesses may outsource a lot of infrastructure but still retain control of their intellectual property and data.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/01/service_outages/

Jan 04 2006

“Extranets” or “client workspaces”?

Beyond the architecture, engineering and construction industry, the legal profession was another field which took to ‘extranets’ in a big way. A Legal Technology News article suggests that the term may have morphed: into "client workspaces".

The term may have evolved in the legal world, but I can’t see us shifting towards such a term in the AEC sector. While the ultimate client remains a key member of the project team, some clients adopt something of a hands-off approach to the schemes they commission, briefing the team and then letting the professionals get on with the detailed work. Moreover, collaboration takes place between a much wider group of businesses than would be found in most client/law firm relationships, with many sub-contractors, sub-consultants and consultants having only an indirect contractual relationship.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/01/extranets_or_cl/

Jan 04 2006

Yorkshire broadband coverage reaches 100%

Having spent many days in various parts of Yorkshire, including holidays in some of the most remote and beautiful parts of the county, I was interested to read Silicon.com’s report, Yorkshire hits 100 per cent broadband.

This doesn’t, of course, mean that everyone is using broadband – Yorkshire still has one of the lowest take-up rates in the country – but it is a sign that geographic location can increasingly not be used as an excuse for not having fast internet access.

Once it was assumed you had to be located in a major city to have broadband (London was one of the first into "the illustrious 100 per cent club"), and I think it is fair to say that telecoms providers will always focus their initial efforts on improving services in major conurbations. For instance, another Silicon.com item, UK cities to get blanket wi-fi coverage, details how, by March this year, citywide wi-fi hotspots will be rolled out in eight of the UK’s biggest cities and three London boroughs (Birmingham, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Nottingham and Oxford, plus Kensington and Chelsea, Camden, and Islington).

The networks are being built by European wireless provider the Cloud, with coverage provided through wi-fi equipment fitted on lampposts (see also this BBC story) and street signs. It won’t be free, unfortunately – users will pay a participating ISP for access (revenues will be split between the Cloud, the local council and the ISP). More cities are expected to be announced later in the year; George Polk, CEO of the Cloud, said the aim is to provide wireless coverage across all the UK’s cities and major centres of population.

I think this means that the 4,000 households and around 800 businesses in Ramsgill Dale in North Yorkshire may still have a long time to wait for wi-fi access.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/01/yorkshire_broad/

Jan 02 2006

Christmas working (2)

Since my pre-Christmas musings about those who might work over the holiday period, I have had chance to analyse traffic regarding users of BIW Information Channel.

Despite the widespread UK AEC industry shutdown, there were still individuals who logged in to work between Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. In total, BIW saw 553 logins (with two new users added to the user base), with 398 documents and 131 drawings published to the BIW system.

Small beer in the great scheme of things (2005 saw some two million logins, and 443,000 CAD files and 255,000 other documents published in total), but I am sure these few BIW users were gratified to find their online extranet fully operational throughout the Christmas break.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2006/01/christmas_worki/

Dec 30 2005

“It’s too slow” – blame online radio

Occasionally, as vendors of web-based construction collaboration technologies, we face protests from users who say the extranet solutions are too slow (usually because they don’t offer the almost-instantaneous responsiveness of software loaded onto their hard drive or perhaps their local area network). As ASPs, we can do a lot to ensure that our applications are working as fast as possible up to the point at which data leaves our hosting environments, but there is little we can do on our own to influence the speed at which that data arrives on users’ desktops.

In project reviews, I have discussed occasions where access to BIW Information Channel, for example, slowed right down at lunch-time – as users’ colleagues suddenly turned to the internet to book holidays, check their bank balances, order books, etc, overloading the client organisation’s "pipe" to the internet. Once normal working patterns resumed after lunch, speed of access to the Channel returned to normal.

I was interested, therefore, to read this TechWorld.com article, IT detective work helps end WAN slowdown for construction firm, which discovered a similar problem for users of Primavera Systems’ Expedition project management software (hosted by application service provider LoadSpring Solutions on servers accessed over T1 links in a WAN). In this instance, the culprit for slow performance was wider-than-expected use of online radio. Once this WAN traffic was de-prioritised, the speed of access to Expedition improved again.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/its_too_slow_bl/

Dec 29 2005

Asite CEO goes permanent

Almost missed this in the Christmas run-up, but (thanks, Richard) on 21 December, UK collaboration technology vendor Asite announced to the London Stock Exchange the following directorate changes:

  • following the appointment of Mr. Gordon Ashworth as acting Chief Executive Officer in March 2005, that this position has now been made permanent
  • Mr Tony Ryan, Sales Director, has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer with immediate effect; and,
  • that Sir John Egan has announced his intention to retire from the Board at the end of December 2005.

Colin Goodall, Chairman, commented: "The board would like to take the opportunity to thank Sir John for his valuable contribution to the Company and wish him every success with his future endeavours."

No great surprises there, though there may be some investors who will be concerned at the loss of such a notable and influential industry figure as Egan (the Asite share price dipped briefly below 2p the following day).

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/asite_ceo_goes_/

Dec 29 2005

Service outages (2)

Since my previous post (Christmas Eve, no less!) about Salesforce.com’s outage, I have been monitoring some bloggers’ and other writers’ responses.

I wouldn’t go as far as Ralph Grabowski and – after the interruptions to TypePad and Salesforce.com’s services – conclude that ‘Web 2.0’ is fatally flawed (after all, I could access TypePad and Newsgator via an unfamiliar computer in an rented apartment in central Belfast last week, allowing me to update this blog!). Echoing my own humble opinion, Susan Kuchinskas in an ASPnews.com article quotes someone who argues:

"To say that businesses should not rely upon SaaS or other on-demand applications and services because of potential outages is disingenuous at best…. One may as well claim that network or telecom outages are a reason not to use those services for mission-critical business."

In The glitch that stole salesforce.com, Phil Wainewright seems to hit the nail on the head with his suggestion that the incident has more to do with how the ASP responds to the outage (some of his readers are less charitable – jmjames uses the incident as an excuse to rant and damn all ‘third-party vendors’). In his next post, 0.1% downtime is more than 8 hours a year, Phil responds by pointing out that very few IT shops would be capable of delivering 99.9% uptime – a point supported by another Wainewright reader (chrisbaggott):

"The reality is that that 8 hours a year is probably a lot better than most in house systems. You might also want to consider the thoughts on security as well. Who’s more qualified to manage your data securly? "Bob" your tech guy who is also responsible for cleaning spam of the CEO’s laptop? Or a company that manages data full time for a living?"

Similar points are also made in the ASPnews.com article:

… the issue is the reliability of the particular application, not of the on-demand model. "When it comes down to it, I’d rather pay $65 a user and get an army of IT people at Salesforce.com fixing issues as they come up, [rather] than install Siebel locally and have to pay for that army of IT people myself."

Acknowledging that nearly six hours is a painful outage for anyone, Treb Ryan, CEO of OpSource, said, "Salesforce.com’s uptime is way better than any corporate application I know of. How often are even simple apps, such as e-mail or the phone, down in most organizations?"

What are the learning points from the Salesforce.com episode? Phil Wainewright offers two cardinal rules for ASPs:

  1. Keep users informed – ASPs should alert customers immediately when there’s an outage and keep in touch with status reports. "Salesnet has four tiers of customers; those at the top can expect hourly calls from account executives and engineers during a ‘code red,’ while the lower tiers can expect e-mails to their administrators."
  2. Be upfront about service levels – ASPs should "spell out to customers the service levels they’ll commit to — and in what circumstances they’ll forfeit penalties, if any."

Finally, in a further posting, Can you trust your service provider?, Wainewright responds to other points from jmjames, providing some additional suggestions for ASPs’ good practice. He gives a five-point code of practice:

  1. Say exactly what the contract does and doesn’t deliver (eg: specify the service levels).
  2. Spell out what to do if something does go wrong (is there another website users can go to for news, or will they receive an email within the hour telling them what’s going on, etc).
  3. Report live service level metrics (can customers view the same dashboard for their services that the provider’s own operations staff get to see?).
  4. Let customers download their data whenever they like ("Nothing else a provider can do offers a better expression of confidence in customer loyalty").
  5. Accept 30 days’ notice of termination at any time, no questions asked.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/service_outages_1/

Dec 24 2005

Service outages

Following my experience of a TypePad Outage last week, I find a potentially far more serious outage is causing critics to question the on-demand model – see Customers vent spleen at Salesforce.com outage and Salesforce Outage a Blow to On-Demand Sector?.

The timing is both a disaster and a benefit. For businesses reliant on the software to manage their pre-Christmas sales efforts, any prolonged downtime for their CRM software is a potential killer blow for firms heavily reliant on their Christmas sales. However, for Salesforce.com, the timing may mean that many people may not notice as they may already have finished work for the holiday period; offline trade magazines will not publish until the new year, so the PR impact may be less marked than if it had happened a week or so earlier. I will monitor the online fall-out from this outage, and see how Salesforce.com’s crisis management PR skills stand up.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/service_outages-2/

Dec 20 2005

Needed: a new NCCTP standard: how to account for extranet ‘traffic’

In addition to vendors’ reluctance to release accurate and realistic statistics relating to their user bases (see recent posts here and here), I also find it difficult to get a clear handle on how much user activity each construction collaboration technology vendor is managing. Let’s take a couple of topical examples.

First, a recent Aconex release says: “In just 18 months, Aconex has managed more than 500,000 mail and document transmittals between 1,600 users on London’s White City development” (a £600 million project for contractor Multiplex).

Second, Cadweb continues to publicise huge numbers on its website. At 7am this morning Cadweb was hosting over four million items (2,104,928 drawings, and 1,984,382 other items “Including: Schedules, Comment files, Specifications, Messages, etc…”) relating to 180 projects. Its Football Pitch Report says this equates to a pile of paper 2,398 metres high or 35.5 Nelson’s Columns.

Clearly, there are massive differences arising from how each vendor is calculating the volume of documentation managed by its system. To put it into context, if Cadweb had just eight projects the size of White City, it would now be hosting just as many items as its current 180 schemes put together.

As I have previously written (see ‘Statistics, statistics’, 27 September 2005), the main discrepancy arises because Cadweb’s drawing total relates to the total number of drawing copies, whereas other vendors might count each file once only regardless of how many individuals it is issued to. BIW, for example, suggests there are eight people on an average issue list. Other vendors remain silent on the issue. Maybe they don’t want their numbers to look insignificant compared to their competitors; maybe they don’t have the system reporting tools to collate such statistics; or maybe they are reluctant to indulge in a statistical battle where each vendor applies different approaches.

What is needed is a standard way for the construction collaboration technology vendors to calculate the volume of activity their systems are handling, so that meaningful comparisons can be made. Perhaps this is something for the NCCTP to consider?

This brings me to one final point arising from the Aconex news release. It claims that “nearly 40% of all new construction projects in the UK, valued at over £10 million, are now using a project collaboration system… This compares to less than 5% just 3 years ago.” Its source is “Compagnia independent analysis”.

Short-lived e-business consultancy Compagnia, led by Mike Halsall, produced its report on the UK AEC collaboration sector in 2003, so I think Aconex has based its claim on a projection made some three years ago. Since then – see chapter two of my book – the IT Construction Forum 2004 survey suggested that 43% of projects were using project extranets. However, that finding is now around 18 months old; we really should be looking to gather more up-to-date evidence of take-up.

As a vendors’ organisation, therefore, the NCCTP should be looking to promote the technologies backed up by:

  • solid evidence of the benefits of the technology (research is due to be undertaken in 2006, I’m pleased to say)
  • clear statistics (calculated in a clear, consistent and unambiguous way) about the total user base and the traffic through the various members’ systems
  • up-to-date figures on the extent to which construction collaboration technologies have been adopted in the UK AEC market (perhaps it’s time for the IT Construction Forum to repeat its industry survey)

On the second point in particular, I appreciate there may be some commercial sensitivities about each vendor’s user base, etc, but surely the CIRIA secretariat (or some other independent) could be trusted to verify and collate the figures and then aggregate the data so that we have some impressive overall numbers that the NCCTP could use to underline the key role the technologies now play in today’s AEC market.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/needed_a_new_nc/

Dec 19 2005

Christmas working

Today’s Guardian newspaper has an article suggesting that more than two in five office workers plan to log on to their work emails over the festive period (men are slightly more likely to do so, as are people living in London compared to those living in Humberside). As a blogger writing about extranets, this leads me to ask two or three related questions:

  1. How many corporate bloggers will be blogging over the holiday period? And how many readers will be looking at what the corporate bloggers post?
  2. How many users will be logging into a construction project extranet during the holiday period?

Much of the UK construction industry will progressively be shutting down completely from the latter part of this week until after New Year’s Day. Many site-based industry professionals will have little reason to log-in to their projects, but I suspect it won’t be a complete switch-off. There will be some keen types who will use the Christmas break as a chance to catch up on work – designers might publish a few more CAD files, QSs a spreadsheet or two, for example – and they will expect their project’s collaboration solution to be available to them, Christmas or not. And it’s not just the technology that needs to be available; if there are any problems, the providers need to ensure that some of their people are also available (some of my BIW colleagues will be on-call during the holiday period, for instance).

See this Silicon.com article for other traditional Christmas press releases.

Permanent link to this article: http://extranetevolution.com/2005/12/christmas_worki-2/

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