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CWComputer Weekly’s DIGItAl mAGAzIne for europeAn It leADers DeCember 2013

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Can Europe give the world cloud coverage?european commission urges suppliers to build continent-wide ‘trusted cloud region’ after us surveillance exposé

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seadrill migrates datacentre to

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patients demand access to tHeir

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EuropEan nEws

Gartner: GE Capital rethinks strategic supplier policy

Financial services business GE capital is rethinking its strategy for selecting sup-pliers to boost innovation in iT. speaking at a seminar at the Gartner symposium in Barcelona, kevin Griffin, cio GE capital, said the iT function was on a journey to simplify the systems it runs and supports.

Fear of cloud servers fading fast among UK organisations

More than a fifth of datacentre servers in the Uk are now outsourced and the pro-portion is expected to reach 28% by 2016. Research from analyst DcD intelligence found that, while worldwide growth in server outsourcing was initially fuelled by emerging economies, more mature markets such as the Uk’s are increasingly persuaded of the benefits.

Qualys launches security metrics project at RSA Europe

security company Qualys has launched a security metrics initiative at RsA Europe 2013 in Amsterdam. The intention is to collect as many useful security metrics as possible to enable data-driven security, said Qualys’s chief technology officer Wolfgang kandek.

ECB warns companies about last-minute Sepa migrations

The European central Bank (EcB) has warned organisations that have left migration to the single European

Payments Area (sepa) they could face problems. in its latest report, the EcB said migration was progressing well for credit transfers, but running late for direct debit.

UK sees fastest falling PC shipments in Western Europe

Pc sales to Uk businesses slumped by more than a quarter between July and september 2013, according to research by analyst organisation Gartner. Total Pc shipments in the Uk, including consumer sales, dropped by 21.2% compared to the same period last year – a faster decline than that in France and Germany. But sales for professional use in the Uk fell faster still, down 28.1% since the third quarter of 2012. n

AdditionAl resources

› all you need to know about tablets

› uk startups: essential guide

› guide to software-defined networks

› big data storage: How to build it

› guide to software as a service

› vdi storage: key steps in deployment

› computer weekly supplier directory

nsA And GcHQ surveillAnce breAks eu lAw

mass internet surveillance by us and uk intelligence agencies violates european law, according to a study by two academics.

sergio Carrera of the Centre for european policy studies and francesco ragazi of leiden university told the european parliament’s Committee on Civil liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in brussels (pictured) the intelligence services of the us, uk and other european countries violated eu privacy and co-operation laws and urged the european parliament to act.

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european news

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ec urges europe: become ‘trusted

cloud region’

seadrill migrates datacentre to

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vtl deployment

european c-level executives seek data scientists

patients demand access to tHeir

medical records

cern scientists collaborate

witH vidyo

Editor’s commEnt

The EC’s vision of Europe as a trusted cloud computing hub

The European commission (Ec) believes Europe could be viewed as the “trusted cloud region”, by turning revelations about the Us government’s

Prism surveillance programme to Europe’s advantage, building on its high standards of data protection and the security of its cloud services.

Earlier this year, whistleblower Edward snowden disclosed details about Prism, the Us national security Agency’s project to gain access to information, from nine internet companies, on foreign targets outside the Us. At the time of snowden’s exposé, Ec vice-president neelie kroes pointed out that Us cloud providers could lose business because of Prism.

cW Europe investigates how European providers could turn the Prism revelations to their advantage, developing cloud services that global customers would view as more secure and transparent, as users increas-ingly demand cheaper and more flexible iT services.

Also in this issue, find out how offshore drilling com-pany seadrill shifted its headquarters from stavanger, norway to London – with only six months to plan, design and execute a new iT infrastructure before the old, externally managed set-up was switched off.

The computer Weekly European User Awards have now opened for 2014. All the deadline dates for the networking, security, enterprise software, storage and datacentre awards can be found on our awards site, along with details of how to enter. if you missed out on an award this year or have undertaken an innovative project you want to share with us, we would love to hear about it for our 2014 awards series.

This is our last issue of cW Europe for the year and we wish all our readers a Merry christmas and a peace-ful new Year – see you again in 2014! n

› Click here for the 2014 european user Awards page

Kayleigh Bateman Editor of CW Europe Special projects editor for Computer Weekly

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ec urges europe: become ‘trusted

cloud region’

seadrill migrates datacentre to

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vtl deployment

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patients demand access to tHeir

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cloud sEcurity

European cloud providers must turn the revelations about the Us government’s Prism surveillance project into an oppor-

tunity to build globally trusted cloud services, the European commission (Ec) has said.

The Ec says Us whistleblower Edward snowden’s exposé could slow down the adoption of cloud computing services and Europe should build on its “relatively high standards” of data protection, security, interoperability and transparency of cloud services, to become the world’s trusted cloud region.

Earlier this year, national security Agency (nsA) contractor snowden revealed the Us government’s Prism programme allows the Us intelligence community to gain access to

nine large internet companies and a wide range of digital information on foreign targets operating outside the Us. At the time, Ec vice-president neelie kroes said Us cloud service providers could suffer a loss of business following snowden’s revelations.

in a memo the Ec says that, as cloud users become more conscious of the need for cheap, flexible iT services without compro-mising privacy, Europe should exploit its higher standards of security and transpar-ency to develop cloud services.

cloud providers should use Europe’s security, privacy and transparency standards to their advantage and aim to make Europe the world’s most secure and trusted region for cloud computing, says the commission.

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The European Commission (EC) makes a number of recommendations to build trust in the region’s cloud computing providers. Archana Venkatraman reports

EC urges Europe: become a ‘trusted cloud region’ in the post-Prism age

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functioning internal market for cloud com-puting. it advises providers to restore trust with greater transparency, use of high stand-ards, avoiding lock-in contracts and providing audit reports of data access to customers.

it also urges the region’s largest iT procurer – the public sector – to widely adopt European cloud services to drive adoption among other enterprises.

“Achieving this ambition is not a task for the Ec alone. it begins with the cloud provid-ers themselves and includes all stakeholders: Member states, industry and individual users,” the Ec says in its memo.

EC urges data protection in concertThe commission also counsels against a “‘Fortress Europe’ approach to cloud. “We need instead a single market for cloud com-puting,” says the memo.

“For example, the proposal for the data protection regulation will provide a uniform legal base for the protection of personal data in Europe. The fundamental principle at stake is the need to look beyond borders when it comes to cloud computing. separate initia-tives or a ‘Fortress Europe’ approach is not going to work,” it warns.

The adoption of secure cloud services in Europe is not going to happen overnight through independent actions undertaken by individual stakeholders. The European cloud computing strategy will help, but it needs the support of member states as well. n

Building trust in cloudThe Ec’s call for Europe to become a global trusted cloud hub comes after it established a European cloud Partnership steering board to discuss the repercussions likely to follow snowden’s revelations. The board members concluded that two issues must be addressed.

one is that trust in cloud is suffering, which affects cloud uptake and results in Europe lagging behind in cloud computing adoption.

second, the Prism revelations have led to calls for national or regional cloud computing initiatives. But the Ec warns such fragmenta-tion or segmentation of the cloud computing market along national or regional lines could hold back the development of cloud comput-ing in Europe.

Addressing the concerns of European citizens, businesses and public administra-tions should be seen as an opportunity for the development of cloud computing in Europe. Tackling the current lack of regula-tory consistency in particular could boost the competitiveness of the European economy.

The commission advises regional cloud providers to turn the security, privacy and transparency standards to their competitive advantage and aim to make Europe the world’s most secure and trusted region for cloud computing.

The commission suggests cloud provid-ers should develop across the European Union (EU) single market for cloud comput-ing where the barriers to data movement in the EU is reduced to boost competitive-ness. it says Europe must establish a fully

cloud sEcurity

Hybrid it A reAlity As cloud Goes mAinstreAm

About 69% of organisations in the uk have adopted at least one cloud-based service, according to research from Cloud Industry forum (CIf).

the research highlights the fact most organisations (86%) that operate an on-premise server room or datacentre continue to invest in on-premise It while using a cloud-based service.

this means a typical enterprise in the uk has a hybrid It estate comprising a range of cloud, on-premise and hosted services, according to the not-for-profit industry body.

the research reveals that more than two-thirds (69%) of enterprises use cloud services for at least one area in their organisation. this represents a compound growth of 44% since the first survey was conducted by CIf in 2010.

In 2014, 15% will report a primary cloud-based It strategy and a further 15% will remain entirely on-premise, says CIf. but 70% of enterprises will have a hybrid It infrastructure.

Archana Venkatraman is the datacentre editor of Computer Weekly

CW Europe December 2013 6

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european news

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ec urges europe: become ‘trusted

cloud region’

seadrill migrates datacentre to

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vtl deployment

european c-level executives seek data scientists

patients demand access to tHeir

medical records

cern scientists collaborate

witH vidyo

casE study

Seadrill migrates datacentre to virtual private cloud in six months

When seadrill, the offshore drilling company, decided to move its headquarters from norway to

London in December 2012, its iT team had six months to plan, design and execute its new infrastructure before the norwegian datacentre – the company’s infrastructure hub – went offline.

seadrill’s main datacentre was located at its office premises in stavanger, norway, managed by an external datacentre services provider. it also had several server rooms and small iT hubs at its regional offices in oil and gas-rich areas such as Dubai, singapore, Brazil and Thailand.

“When we decided to relocate the main office to London, we had to decide whether to build our own datacentre or to outsource it,” says Richard Du Plessis, vice-president and cio of seadrill.

The iT team had to plan and execute its iT strategy quickly, as the main datacentre in norway was scheduled to be switched off in June 2013. “We realised we did not have much time to build our own datacentre, so we decided to outsource it,” says Du Plessis.

The team launched a request for proposals for iT procurement, and then evaluated sup-pliers including iBM, capgemini, hP, BT and the company which managed its norwegian datacentre. seadrill already had iT contracts with iBM and capgemini, but in this case it opted for hP’s private cloud infrastructure.

The easiest option would have been to continue with the existing datacentre sup-plier or to host seadrill’s datacentre infra-structure with existing iT supplier iBM, says Du Plessis. “But when we went through the evaluation process, hP’s services stood out from the others for our needs,” he says.

The offshore drilling firm met challenging deadlines to move its in-house datacentre in Norway to a virtual private cloud, writes Archana Venkatraman

sEA

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seadrill maintains It hubs at its regional offices in Dubai, singapore, brazil and thailand

CW Europe December 2013 7

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european news

editor’s comment

ec urges europe: become ‘trusted

cloud region’

seadrill migrates datacentre to

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ntt europe saves backup time witH

vtl deployment

european c-level executives seek data scientists

patients demand access to tHeir

medical records

cern scientists collaborate

witH vidyo

IT and financial flexibilityThe iT team wanted a managed datacentre hosting provider, but hP suggested its virtual private cloud suite to seadrill. The decision to go with virtual private cloud was a strategic one. A virtual private cloud is the logical division of a service provider’s public-cloud, multi-tenanted architecture to support private cloud computing in a public cloud environment.

“seadrill is a divestment-oriented company. We are in the fast-evolving sector of oil and natural gas, which means new exploration areas, new drilling projects and new tech-nologies,” says Du Plessis.

A cloud-based infrastructure will increase the company’s iT and financial flexibility. “in an in-house datacentre, we cannot downsize and have to pay for the full capacity. But in the case of cloud infrastructure, we don’t have to pay for capacity that we will not use in case of a divestiture,” he says.

But why hP’s virtual private cloud services? The iT team knew that all applications must be fully virtualised under a private cloud infrastructure, but it had several legacy applications which did not lend themselves to a virtualised environment. Rather than the standard cloud offering available from many suppliers, the company needed a service that it could customise.

A degree of flexibility that could accommo-date seadrill’s legacy applications was one of the main criteria for the new infrastructure. hP allowed minor reconfiguration of the pri-vate cloud suite to accommodate the com-pany’s legacy apps and physical databases.

The cost of the service was another crite-rion. “When we looked at the overall busi-ness case – and not just the cost of the virtual private cloud – hP emerged as better and cheaper,” says Du Plessis.

seadrill continued its iT contracts with iBM and capgemini. While the main datacentre is hosted in hP’s private cloud infrastructure, iBM maintains seadrill’s applications across all its regional offices and capgemini looks after the iT at its oil rig locations.

Network and licence challengesThe iT team began the migration in February 2013. “The actual project time was just four months,” says Du Plessis.

An iT army of 25 professionals began the migration with help from hP’s team. But there were lessons to learn.

changing the wide area network (WAn) infrastructure was a tricky process, as was maintaining virtual private network (VPn) connectivity between seadrill’s regional offices and hP’s cloud infrastructure in the Uk. seadrill migrated the WAn infrastruc-ture from Verizon in norway to BT in the Uk.

“networking turned out the most challeng-ing element of the iT to move,” he says.

Application setup issues stemming from the legacy applications persuaded seadrill to keep its databases hosted on physical serv-ers instead of the private cloud.

Most of seadrill’s databases are oracle, so the iT team had to factor in the licensing complexities during the migration from its stavanger-based datacentre to hP’s virtual private cloud.

casE study

informAtion sHArinG key to security, sAy experts

sharing information on threats faster is essential in the face of increasingly sophisticated attacks, according to freddy Dezeure, head of the european union computer emergency response team (eu-Cert).

However, this is typically hampered by a lack of adequate tools, concerns about brand damage and a tendency to make too much information classified, Dezeure told the Isse 2013 security conference in brussels.

“zero-day threats are also bought on the underground market for greater sums than security suppliers are willing to pay,” he said, meaning the information is rarely available to businesses.

As a result, businesses are regularly targeted by cyber attacks that can take up to 48 hours to control and malware that can remain undiscovered on business networks for up to a year before it is found.

CW Europe December 2013 8

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ec urges europe: become ‘trusted

cloud region’

seadrill migrates datacentre to

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ntt europe saves backup time witH

vtl deployment

european c-level executives seek data scientists

patients demand access to tHeir

medical records

cern scientists collaborate

witH vidyo

“oracle’s licensing and pricing in norway did not benefit us and we used the infra-structure project as an opportunity to rene-gotiate oracle licensing,” Du Plessis says.

To simplify the process, the iT team moved from processor-based licensing to user-based licensing for its cloud infrastructure in the Uk. “The oracle Uk team was very flexible and the user-based licensing works for us now,” he says.

Minimising disruptionJust recently, seadrill moved the oracle business intelligence (Bi) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) databases back to physical infrastructure to avoid setup issues.

“We wanted to minimise user disruption, and we did not want to complicate things by

moving process area applications in splits,” says Du Plessis. This meant the iT team had to plan the migration strategically, so it readied all applications of human resource (hR) systems to migrate in one go, doing likewise for financial applications.

While the private cloud infrastructure in the Uk has been operating since July 2013, Du Plessis and his team are still ironing out application and network issues. “it should all be sorted soon, and then we can move to longer-term application architectural review,” he says. The review will help the iT team to slowly phase out legacy applications and prepare all elements of iT for the cloud.

in addition to cost savings on iT resources and a more agile and flexible infrastructure, seadrill has seen other benefits.

“Although it is early days, we have not experienced any downtime, like the latest Amazon Web services (AWs) glitch that affected netflix and instagram,” he says.

“i expected cloud products to be more rigid, so i was pleasantly surprised to learn that it can be tweaked to accommodate our legacy applications.”

Du Plessis says the technology to move datacentre infrastructure to cloud has become very sophisticated. “it is much easier today. All my previous datacentre consolida-tion and migration projects have been a lot harder and more expensive and involved bigger teams,” he says. n

casE study

“I was pleasantly surprIsed our cloud product could be tweaked to accommodate our legacy applIcatIons”rIchard du plessIs, seadrIll

sEA

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CW Europe December 2013 9

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european news

editor’s comment

ec urges europe: become ‘trusted

cloud region’

seadrill migrates datacentre to

private cloud in six montHs

ntt europe saves backup time witH

vtl deployment

european c-level executives seek data scientists

patients demand access to tHeir

medical records

cern scientists collaborate

witH vidyo

storagE hardwarE

Networking and managed services provider nTT Europe – an arm of the Japanese telco nTT – has ditched tape backups and cut its

backup window from more than 12 hours to less than four. The company – which has 700 enterprise-class European customers, which it supports from five Uk and European sites – embarked on a ¤1.8m project to deploy sepa-ton virtual tape libraries (VTL) for more than a petabyte of data.

The project was aimed at revamping its backup regime to one based on data dedupli-cation and disk from one based predomi-nantly on tape, with a small amount of staging disk in JBoD form. A key difficulty, says senior product manager Europe Adam Lembariti, was that writing data to tape was inefficient, due to the volume and varied nature of data from different customers.

This led to so-called shoeshining, which is where less than optimal amounts of

data are fed to tape-writing heads that must constantly stop, reverse and

start again in an effort to fill tape capacity and cope with less than optimal throughput. “With very mixed customer data it was difficult to enforce uniformity at the front end and manage complexity at the back end,”

says Lembariti.“We back up about 200TB

of data every night and, being a service provider with lots of

customers, our data is very fragmented, there is a lot

of it and it is complex to manage. There

was also the sub-stantial challenge of managing

hundreds of tapes.”

NTT Europe saves time with Sepaton data deduplicationThe managed services supplier has cut its backup window, replacing tape backups with a ¤1.8m virtual tape library deployment, writes Antony Adshead

“wIth very mIxed data It was dIffIcult to enforce unIformIty at the front end and manage complexIty at the back end”adam lembarItI, ntt

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european news

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ec urges europe: become ‘trusted

cloud region’

seadrill migrates datacentre to

private cloud in six montHs

ntt europe saves backup time witH

vtl deployment

european c-level executives seek data scientists

patients demand access to tHeir

medical records

cern scientists collaborate

witH vidyo

storagE hardwarE

Set-up specificationnTT Europe deployed sepaton s2100-Es2 vir-tual tape library hardware with back-end capac-ity supplied by hitachi Data systems AMs arrays (pictured) with Fibre channel drives at five sites – two in the Uk and one each in France, spain and Germany – starting in the first quarter of this year.

Data is backed up using symantec netBackup to the sepaton hardware. Data deduplication is nei-ther inline nor post-process but, according to sepaton, “concurrent”. A full, compressed copy of the backup is retained at the target while process-ing takes place when a 50GB tape cartridge’s worth of data is ingested. A single sepaton device can

manage throughput up to 43.2TB/hour, to a maxi-mum capacity of 1.6PB before deduplication.

“We benchmarked a few similar products, but rejected them for a number of different reasons, such as integration with our backup product,” says Lembariti. “sepaton has integration with symantec open storage technology and has very good data deduplication.”

NTT Europe after VTL adoptionThe key benefits for Lembariti’s team centre on the ability to keep a month’s worth of data on disk for almost instant restore and doing away with reli-ance on tape on a day-to-day basis. “The challenge of managing tapes on a daily basis has gone and now we only use it for long-term storage,” he says.

The backup window has decreased from more than 12 hours to less than four, and there are no more bottlenecks, as data no longer struggles to be ingested into the backup hardware at sub-opti-mal rates.

“We’ve saved hundreds of staff hours in manage-ment,” says Lembariti. n

“the challenge of managIng tapes on a daIly basIs has gone and now we only use It for long-term storage” adam lembarItI, ntt

Antony Adshead is the storage editor of Computer Weekly

dAtA evolution meAns bAckup modernisAtion

plenty of It shops still perform nightly incremental backups along with weekly full backups, but many organisations are increasingly finding that their data – and the recovery requirements for that data – are breaking the backup models they have relied on for so long. for storage managers addressing inadequate backup operations, this may mean confronting the difficult but critical task of backup modernisation.

there are three main types of data protection in use today: continuous data protection; snapshots; and image-based backups.

CW Europe December 2013 11

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cloud region’

seadrill migrates datacentre to

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european c-level executives seek data scientists

patients demand access to tHeir

medical records

cern scientists collaborate

witH vidyo

BusinEss applications

Research undertaken by onePoll, for database and analytic software supplier Teradata, confirms two assumptions common among industry commentators: cEos in the Uk, France and Germany are crying out for data scientists; and 62% of c-level executives think there is a data science skills shortage, and it is a real

problem. The survey questioned 300 c-level executives, 100 from each country.Duncan Ross, European director of data science at Teradata, says the research con-

firms his suspicion that pressure for building up data science capabilities is coming from the most senior levels. But he expresses surprise that as many as 46% overall and 43% in the Uk are looking to existing iT staff to fill data scientist roles. “That’s concerning, because any business trend that looks to iT to this extent is in trouble,” he says.

European C-level executives crying out for data scientistsBoard members in the UK, France and Germany say the data science skills gap is proving a real problem for their organisations. Brian McKenna reports

europeAn orGAnisAtions on tHe roAd to biG dAtA

the teradata survey also found:n 44% of organisations have a roadmap for big data;n 19% are already running big data projects (26% in Germany, 13% in the uk);n 42% are currently recruiting or thinking of recruiting data scientists or other big data roles.

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ec urges europe: become ‘trusted

cloud region’

seadrill migrates datacentre to

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patients demand access to tHeir

medical records

cern scientists collaborate

witH vidyo

BusinEss applications

Creativity versus people skillsRoss says he is surprised that “creativity” is a quality strongly sought by 35% overall and 36% in the Uk, as is problem-solving (43% and 38%) and, more predictably, he says, technical experience (53% and 59%). Experience is more highly prized than edu-cation in the survey. only 24% are looking for a relevant degree.

“People skills” does not emerge as important, with 17% of executives over-all and 16% in the Uk rating it important – contrary to what is often supposed. Mathematical competence is only cited as important by 20% of respondents.

however, 54% of Uk respondents say potential recruits do not have the right combination of business, iT, analytics and communication skills. Ross wonders if organisations might not be better advised to build teams, combining these skills, rather than seek out individual candidates possessing them all.

“Are organisations set up in such a way as to encourage that?” he says. “This research does not go into that. My own anecdotal evidence suggests organisations seem to be struggling to find the optimal way of deploying analytical resources.”

once recruited, most (51%) of data scientists will report to departments other than iT, with almost one quarter (23%) reporting directly to the board. n

uk respondents say recruIts do not have the rIght combInatIon of busIness, It, analytIcs and communIcatIon skIlls

Brian McKenna is the business applications editor of Computer Weekly

services supplier looks to sAp to boost recruitment

Insurance software and It services firm ssp has implemented sAp’s successfactors to improve its recruitment and skills development. Clare bates, Hr and transformation director at ssp, describes the firm’s engagement with sAp as cementing a process of tying ssp together that has its origins in the 2008 acquisition of sirius, a similar-sized competitor.

ssp supplies software and services to insurance and financial services organisations. It has decided to implement cloud-based Hr software from successfactors and sAp Jam, the enter-prise software supplier’s social collaboration tool. this replaces a proposed intranet based on microsoft sharepoint.

bates says ssp had previously used standalone systems which had largely relied on recruit-ment agencies. business growth means the firm needs Java developers to work on the specific system implementations required, mainly, in the insurance sector. “It is a difficult market for good quality people, with competing firms fishing in the same small pond,” she says.

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patients demand access to tHeir

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outsourcing

English patients are willing to change doctors to access their electronic medical records (EMR), but just 16% currently have access to those records, according to Accenture. The consultancy conducted global research among 9,000 respond-ents and found substantial conflict between what patients want and what doc-

tors want. over three-quarters (77%) of English patients think they should have full access to their patient records, but only 34% of doctors agree.

A remarkable 97% of English patients and 94% of doctors agree patients should have some degree of access to their EMR, but 67% have no access. Giving patients access to their records could help them manage their own health but, according to the research, only 37% of English patients track their own health data, such as blood pressure, weight and physical activity. This compares to 51% in other countries Accenture surveyed.

Outsourcing records gives patients health data accessPatients can improve outcomes by tracking health data, but few can access their records. Karl Flinders looks at the progress of the electronic patient care system

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patients demand access to tHeir

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outsourcing

“As consumers take more responsibility for managing their own health, the role of digital medical records is shifting from a mere clinical repository to a platform for shared decision-making among patients and doctors,” says Aimie chapple, managing director for Accenture’s Uk health business. “self-tracking personal health information can help doctors identify health risks much earlier. When patients are part of the record-keeping process, it can increase their understanding of their condition and treatment needed.”

Outsourced electronic patient care system gets underwaynine English organisations – comprising the southern community and child health Procurement consortium – have started implementing an outsourced electronic patient care system, with Accenture and system-maker The Phoenix Partnership (TPP). TPP’s systmone enables clinicians to access and exchange health information across the national health system (nhs). Dorset healthcare University nhs Foundation Trust was the first to fully launch the system, with more than 500 clinicians using it at the start.

Val Graves, director of community health services, Dorset healthcare says: “The intro-duction of a patient administration system is a huge leap forward for patients and staff. it will enable greater co-ordination of care, reduce the burden of paperwork and streamline our clinical and administration processes.”

The other organisations in the southern community and child health Procurement consortium are: sirona care & health; Gloucestershire care services nhs Trust; Plymouth, community healthcare, kent community health nhs Trust, Peninsula community health; East sussex healthcare Trust; sussex community Trust; and swindon-based sEQoL social enterprise. n

Karl Flinders is the services editor of Computer Weekly

it services outsourcinG surGes bAck in europe

the highest number of It outsourcing contracts ever signed in europe took place in the third quarter of 2013, according to the latest figures from Information services Group (IsG).

of a total of 176 outsourcing deals worth €2.8bn, 125 were for It outsourcing, worth €2.3bn. the value of It outsourcing contracts signed was the second highest recorded in a quarter, and 177% higher than the previous quarter, with almost double the number of deals.

nine of the 10 global “megadeals” – worth over €80m – were signed in europe.“europe, the middle east and Africa achieved the highest third-quarter results on record,

a strong rebound from the weakness observed in the first half of the year,” says John keppel, president IsG north europe.

“While the improvements we are seeing compare to weak performances in the first half, we believe the high level of contracting activity speaks volumes about the underlying strength of the current market.”

the uk showed strong third-quarter results with contract value of €680m, which was 35% higher than the previous three months. However, Germany led the region’s growth, posting €810m in actual contract value and surpassing the uk for the first time.

the financial services sector quadrupled its spending over the quarter, recording its largest ever third quarter result.

IsG expects the upturn to continue. “Casting a look ahead to the final quarter of this year, we predict a continuation of the healthy

contracting activity just witnessed,” says the company. “However, the protracted global weakness of the first half of the year remains a drag on actual

contract value levels. While we expect the year to finish strongly, it may be down somewhat compared with 2012.”

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The European organisation for nuclear Research, more commonly known as cern, is located in Geneva in switzerland, but globally renowned for its ground-breaking scientific work, be it creating the world wide web or seeking out the higgs boson – the so-called “God particle” – with its Large hadron collider.

But despite having such a famous central base, cern comprises over 20,000 scientists from 113 different countries based at 600 universities and institutions across the globe, collaborating with each other on numerous projects. communication is key to the organ-isation and cern chose very early on to use video conferencing, ensuring its members could speak face-to-face whenever they needed to.

Physicists’ first foray into video conferencingcern took its first steps into video conferencing in 1996 when it decided to develop its own system. “cern often encounters technical challenges as we get there first, be it due to our bigger scale or more complex set-up, and we often need to develop our own solutions for such problems,” says Tim smith, group leader of collaboration and information services in the iT department at cern.

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How Cern scientists learned to collaborate with Vidyo

Jennifer Scott looks at how the European Nuclear Research Centre ditched its own video conference system and embraced technology from a supplier

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“in the early 1990s, with the collaborative nature of how we work, it was only natural that we looked to video conferencing and realised we needed face-to-face interaction with our physicists around the world, so we became the first adopters and, indeed, developers of some of the technology.”

The collaboration team developed what smith refers to as a rudimentary system. it rapidly took off, as cern tailored the home-grown technology to its needs. however, even the best scientists in the world realised their system could not last forever. “As is often the case with early adopters, the world outside catches up and often overtakes us, thanks to both open source developments and commercial offerings,” says smith.

“We were happily going along throughout the 1990s and much of the 2000s. But in this time the world was racing along and new technology was being created, with new standards and other new solutions.”

Slow integration for interoperabilityin 2009 the iT team at cern began to examine other options. Vidyo came top, with its use of scalable video coding (sVc) technology, which enables high-definition video to be streamed using subset video bitstreams to re-use the bandwidth requirements of large video transfers. in 2010, smith and his team decided to implement a pilot of Vidyo, won over not just by its performance but by its interoperability. “one of the key things for us is it had to work on every device,” he says.

“We do not want to control nor do we have any desire to control the devices our col-laborators use, be it Windows, Mac, any flavour of Linux, mobile devices and so on. however, we do want to ensure quality across all those devices.”

The iT department took its time with the pilot, taking almost two years before a full implementation. “We gradually expanded the pilot and worked with the company to ensure it met our needs, but we didn’t jump over straight away,” says smith. “For exam-ple, Vidyo was not mature enough when it came to its Linux integration initially but, by the end of 2012, we felt all our needs had been met and we considered a full move.”

The old internally developed system ran in parallel with Vidyo until the end of 2012. cern made the switch full-time to the new system this year. “it was relatively smooth, with a few operational issues – such as interconnecting all the gateways, siP and tradi-tional phones – but when we switched over we were precisely ready,” says smith.

“since then there haven’t been any major hiccups and the deployment and upgrade of clients was quick and smooth. one of the benefits of working with a commercial provider is that, when they put things together in that world, they think more of deployment and upgrades than we do when we are developing solutions in-house.”

Cern physicists in video conference with the university of birmingham (left); Cern researchers around the world collaborate on challenging scientific problems with the use of video conference technology (right)

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Playing to a tough audienceThe reaction of staff at cern using the system around the globe has been a positive one – and they can be a tough crowd to please. “We are no different from any other community, in the fact our users want a smooth transition with no downtime of any new service. Unless the benefits are going to be huge, they won’t accept anything else,” says smith.

“They are different to your average business, in that they are very hands-on, experi-mental and knowledgeable, so if there are any issues to overcome they will probably try to fix it themselves. They are very nice in that sense and are always trying new things. But, as they know technology and need it for their everyday life, they are very demanding and have no tolerance for outages.”

The deployment of video conferencing at cern is vast and has genuinely helped the institution’s community of mathematicians and physicists collaborate on the world’s most challenging scientific conundrums. Yet video conferencing still has a relatively low adoption in other enter-prises and the long-touted “Year of Video conferencing” has yet to come to fruition.

The future of video conferencingso how does smith envisage the technology’s future outside cern?

“in the early days of video conferencing it was all proprietary systems that were often very expensive and often didn’t interoperate with one another, putting up barriers to adoption,” he says. “With the advent of more and more web-based technologies, albeit with the applications local, the technology became more pervasive and easier to use.

“There will always be different requirements and quirks but, as we push towards web-based systems with the same level of codec, i think adoption will rocket. We have gone through many paradigms of computing, with more focus on hyper text transfer protocol. When we reach that stage with video conferencing, everyone will be familiar with it.”

The issue of quality and reliability has proved a recurrent factor in recent years, putting users off the technology, but smith sees this changing. “You could always, no matter how bad the line was, make out what someone was saying over a phone call,” he says. “in recent times that is where video conferencing has fallen apart. But the latest codes adapt to hard conditions and you can rely on them almost as much as you would a phone line.

“We are almost at that ‘Year of Video conferencing’, but it will be the web and the right codecs that will make it happen.” n

Jennifer Scott is the networking editor of Computer Weekly

“we are almost at that ‘year of vIdeo conferencIng’, but It wIll be the web and the rIght codecs that wIll make It happen” tIm smIth, cern

left to right: tim berners-lee; the large Hadron Collider (lHC) in construction; lHC evidence of the Higgs boson

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