the it decisions behind one of the uk’s largest...
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computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 1
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
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The IT decisions behind one of the UK’s largest construction projects
Why a private cloud was chosen for the Thames Tideway Tunnel project
Home
2-8 FEBRUARY 2016
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 2
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
Government proposes state-owned broadband providerThe Department for Culture, Media and Sport is consulting on the £1.7bn Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) scheme. Its proposals include the creation of a publicly owned broadband provider. The government has to strike a new agreement with EU competition authorities to commit more taxpayer money to BDUK.
Keep customer data safe or pay the price, ICO warns businessCompanies that fail to keep personal data safe risk long-lasting reputational damage, the UK privacy watchdog has warned. According to an Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) poll, nearly 80% of UK consumers would think twice about doing business with an online company that failed to protect personal data. The negative impact of media coverage of data breaches can have a greater effect than ICO fines.
Apple warns of revenue plunge after posting record figuresApple has posted record revenues of $75.9bn and record profits of $18.4bn for the final three months of 2015, but warned that the next quarter will see the first year-on-year revenue decline for 13 years. Although last-quarter revenues were up 1.7% and profits up 2.2% compared with the fourth quarter of 2014, Apple expected revenues of $50bn to $53bn in the first quarter of this year, a year-on-year fall of 9% to 14%.
Mental health patients to log into Skype to see their doctorsSouth West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust is offering Skype as an alternative to face-to-face appointments. Instead of having to visit hospital for an appointment, patients can video-chat with clinicians. The aim is to make it easier for patients to attend appointments, especially those unable or reluctant to leave their home.
Wal-Mart to make huge data and analytics investment in IndiaUS retail giant Wal-Mart is to invest heavily in data and analytics technology and services at its Bangalore centre.
Wal-Mart CIO Karenann Terrell said the Bangalore operation, which has 1,200 staff, will also look at disruptive technologies. “The reason we’re seeing such explosive growth in India is because we’ve merged all those technology capabilities under one roof,” she said.
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
NEWS IN BRIEF
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 3
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
NEWS IN BRIEF
Bank of England CIO John Finch leaves for Thomson ReutersBank of England CIO John Finch is leaving the organisation for a new role as CTO for Thomson Reuters’ financial and risk business. His old department will be split into a programmes and data division and a technology division.
Police overspending on outdated IT systems, says Theresa MayThe home secretary Theresa May has called on police forces to “exploit the potential of technology” and use it to drive efficiency and innovation. She said that police IT needs “sorting out” and that it has taken too long to take that challenge seriously.
VMware to axe 800 jobs in cloud-focused restructureVMware is to cut 800 jobs in a company restructure to counter the softening demand for its server virtualisation software as it shifts its focus to newer product lines.
Cabinet Office looks for £5bn temps sourcing replacementThe Cabinet Office is to replace its Contingent Labour One framework with a deal worth up to £5bn. Initially, the focus will be on “hard-to-fill requirements” for digital, cyber, legacy tech and tech change skills and expertise.
Google stumps up £130m to set-tle all its back taxesGoogle has agreed to pay £130m in back taxes. The deal comes a year after chancellor George Osborne said the government was going after technology companies that make use of “aggressive” tax-avoidance schemes.
Alstom outsources its IT transfor-mation project to HCLEngineering company Alstom has outsourced its IT services to Indian supplier HCL Technologies as part a five-year IT transformation project. The deal will support 30,000 Alstom staff in 62 countries.
AGS Airports outsources IT after Heathrow splitAGS Airports has outsourced IT services for five years to Getronics after splitting from Heathrow Holdings. Covering Aberdeen, Glasgow and Southampton airports, AGS struck the deal to ensure its small IT department could continue to support the airports’ IT systems.
❯ Security crucial to success of internet of things.
❯ Average DDoS attacks fatal to most businesses.
❯ SMEs can ditch broadband deals if speed too slow.
❯ Cheap oil to drive datacentre expansions.
❯Catch up with the latest IT news online
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 4
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probeCourt filings reveal just how far Oracle will go to extract cash from some of its larger customers. Cliff Saran reports
Papers from the Superior Court of California County of San Francisco reveal that confectionary company Mars dis-closed hundreds of thousands of documents during a soft-
ware audit conducted by software supplier Oracle.The software licence dispute could have materially damaged
the business of confectionary company Mars.On 16 December 2015, Oracle and Mars agreed not to proceed
with the licensing dispute going to court, but many of the docu-ments leading up to the filing for dismissal are available in the public domain.
The case highlights the approach Oracle‘s Licence Management Service (LMS) took to audit Mars. The dispute began with a licence review, but quickly escalated. Oracle conducted a full-scale audit discovery process to determine how many servers at Mars ran VMware vSphere 5.5 or above.
Oracle has often tried to force customers to buy an Oracle licence for every physical server on which vSphere is installed, due to the Live Migration facility in vSphere 5.5, which enables virtual machines to seamlessly move across servers.
According to court filings at the Superior Court of California County of San Francisco from 13 May 2015 to 2 September 2015, Mars provided Oracle with 233,089 pages of documents to assist with the audit of Oracle software.
Mars stated that Oracle was unwilling to “come to a mutually agreeable process” for completing an audit. Oracle then sent
Mars a letter stating Mars had materially breached its licence agreement by unreasonable delay and had refused to permit Oracle’s licence review. However, Mars stated that it assembled and produced information ”reasonably necessary to audit Mars’s use of Oracle’s software”.
ANALYSIS
Mars provided 233,089 pages of docuMents to assist in the auditing of oracle software
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 5
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
Mars said it had responded to demands outside the scope of the audit. On 21 August 2015, Oracle asserted that, as Mars was using VMware version 5.1 or higher, it needed to know how many vSphere servers were running at the company.
Defining Oracle software useAccording to industry experts, this was the true intention of Oracle’s software use discovery process. They say Oracle wanted Mars to license all additional servers that were not already licensed to run Oracle.
Oracle defines software use in a way that could affect other organ-isations where an Oracle component is used in a larger system.
The software maker laid out in black and white its definition of a user for the purpose of user-base licensing in Agile, its prod-uct lifecycle management tool. The software company wrote: “The use of records created by Agile is use of Agile software.” According to Oracle, employees working with data that has been exported out of Agile and imported into other software programs are using Oracle’s proprietary analytical, configuration, organisa-tional and management tools in the Agile program.
ANALYSIS
MA
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computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 6
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
In a blog post reflecting on the court filings, Dave Welch, CTO and chief evangelist at House of Brick Technologies, wrote: “The one thing about this action that makes me cringe is that any Oracle customer under audit might be on record as hav-ing provided Oracle 233,089 pages of documents in support of an audit. A customer’s overhead in providing all those pages would very likely directly violate Oracle’s contractual obligation to not unreasonably interfere with the licensee’s normal busi-ness operations.”
In November 2015, analyst Gartner urged CIOs to advise their IT procurement people to clearly define licence usage rights and be aware of terms and policies – such as limits based on core-based or virtualisation licensing.
In the past, many organisations have avoided the risk of vir-tualising Oracle using VMware vSphere by limiting Oracle to physical hardware.
Public disclosure reveals audit processWhen Computer Weekly spoke to IT lawyer Judica Krikke in 2015 about Oracle’s virtualisation licensing policy, she recom-mended IT departments not to take Oracle’s word for granted, advising them instead to “do your investigation, measure usage and challenge the audit”.
Oracle and Mars settled out of court. House of Brick’s Welch said he would have liked to see Oracle’s arguments scrutinised by a court of law: “Oracle appears interested in trying to see if it can get any more money out of any of its Oracle on VMware custom-ers. It also appears to want to do that without a court’s evaluation.”
Risking OracleEarlier this month, Oracle announced plans to hire a sales team of 1,400 in Europe to “help customers respond to the digital imperative and make their businesses future proof”.
Given this recruitment drive, many organisations can expect a call from Oracle in the coming months, leaving CIOs reflecting on whether they are prepared to sign a supplier with a track record of targeting existing customers to generate revenue. n
ANALYSIS
❯How to offset Oracle costs when preparing a move to the cloud.
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computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 7
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
Tideway uses private cloud to manage London ‘super sewer’ infrastructureCaroline Donnelly finds out why Tideway opted for a managed, private cloud setup to support sewer project
The Thames Tideway Tunnel project is designed to give London’s Victorian sewer system the capacity to cope with the sizeable demands placed on it by the capital’s
21st century-sized population.The 25km tunnel will divert the sewage that regularly overflows
into the River Thames so it can be efficiently conveyed elsewhere for treatment.
The project is being spearheaded by Tideway, which will assume day-to-day responsibility for its maintenance once the tunnel is built, while Thames Water will be in charge of operating it as part of the wider London sewerage system.
With tunnelling due to begin this year, Tideway has enlisted the help of managed service provider Advanced 365 to handle the IT infrastructure underpinning the work.
Advanced’s team will provide Tideway with access to human resources (HR) and finance systems, as well as more gen-eral business productivity software. All this will be hosted in a private cloud setup, housed in Advanced 365’s own Tier 3 datacentre.
Although plans for the project have been more than a decade in the making, it was not until August 2015 that details were final-ised for who would finance the construction phase, with purpose-built investment firm Bazalgette Tunnel emerging as the winner.
Managed service strategyRobin Johns, head of IS at Tideway, says this uncertainty has had a sizeable bearing on its decision to adopt a managed service strategy, rather than cultivate an in-house IT team of its own.
“At that point, we didn’t know who was going to buy Tideway, whether it would be a buyer who knew the industry, such as another water utility company, or whether it would end up – as it is today – being an investment firm,” he says.
“If it was another utility company, the likelihood would be that it would have its own systems in place that we would need to plug and play into, whereas an investment firm might be more likely to buy us as a going concern and tell us to get on with it.
“We didn’t know if whoever bought us would come in and rip out everything or just allow us to get on with what we were doing, so
CASE STUDY
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 8
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
we decided to go ‘as a service’ with as much of our IT as we could, in terms of applications, infrastructure and datacentre services.”
The size and scale of the project, which is scheduled for comple-tion in 2023, also set Tideway a challenge in how best to future-proof its IT infrastructure, which is another reason why it chose a managed, private cloud approach.
“As projects evolve from design through to build, through to acceptance and handover, we don’t quite know what our
infrastructure requirements are going to be, as our data and sup-port needs are liable to change all the way through the lifecycle of a large infrastructure product like this,” says Johns.
Frontline support concernsA public cloud-based setup was also out of the question because the organisation was looking for someone to take care of its frontline support concerns too, he says.
CASE STUDY
The 25km tunnel will divert the sewage that regularly overflows into the River Thames so it can be efficiently conveyed elsewhere for treatment
TID
EWAY
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 9
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
“It is more than just cloud we are getting from Advanced – it is running our helpdesk as well as our entire IT infrastructure,” adds Johns. “It wasn’t a question of whether it was Amazon Web Services [AWS] or another public cloud service, because we were looking for one partner to do it all and didn’t want to fragment things too much by taking a multi-provider approach.”
The security offered by any prospective provider was also a big consideration for Tideway, he says, particularly in the light of how high-profile the project is and the fact that it involves looking after an integral part of London’s infrastructure.
At the time of writing, the work to migrate Tideway’s IT infra-structure to the Advanced datacentre was nearing completion, and it will have taken about four months, says Johns.
“We’re probably about 90% there. We have a few more migra-tions to happen, including Microsoft Exchange, and we’re also upgrading a network in one of our offices,” he says. “We have been ramping things up slowly, because we didn’t want a ‘big bang’ transition of service. We wanted to embed them into the team, so they were familiar with how we work and what we do, while allowing our existing provider time to wind down its work.”
Learn from experienceLooking ahead, Johns says his team is keen for other organisa-tions embarking on similar infrastructure projects to learn from Tideway’s experiences to date.
“One of the things we’ve done is set up a business capability modelling analysis,” he says, which has helped the organisation take stock of what needs to be done as the project proceeds.
Using these insights, Johns says Tideway can help similar organ-isations set up to support the roll-out of large-scale infrastructure projects to get off the ground more quickly.
“There will be more pop-up businesses occurring around infra-structure projects like this in future, and working out how to accelerate the setup time is important, as it reduces costs and the impact on stakeholders,” he says. “So, we’re looking to see if there is any work we can do to help other people replicate the work we’ve done in other infrastructure projects.” n
CASE STUDY
❯The high cost of private cloud requires substantial due diligence by CIOs.
With tunnelling beginning this year, Tideway has enlisted the help of managed service provider Advanced 365 to handle the IT infrastructure underpinning the work
TID
EWAY
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Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
Farrer & Co makes a move to the cloud in pursuit of clients’ great expectationsThe law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology, writes Mark Samuels
Not every business can boast a client list with past and pre-sent members of the Royal Family and Charles Dickens, but law firm Farrer & Co – which was founded in 1701 –
boasts a long history of advising clients on legal matters.The firm’s employees delved into the archives last year and read
through some of Dickens’s letters to the business. “He was very friendly with his lawyer,” says Farrer & Co IT director Neil Davison, who is more than a little aware of the importance of the firm’s interesting legacy.
“Let’s just say that, if you look into Dickens’s past, you’ll under-stand why he needed a lot of legal advice. We’ve got the letters on display now. There are references to his separation, his mistress, even the development of plots and characters, such as the demise of Nancy in Oliver Twist.”
When it comes to technology, however, Davison eschews leg-acy and takes a cutting-edge approach to IT-led transformation. Over coffee in the splendour of the firm’s London office overlook-ing Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he talks about achievements so far and long-term plans for change.
INTERVIEW
Davison: “We’re pushing forward and doing things that other legal firms are only starting to consider – we’re definitely leading the way”
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 11
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News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
Understanding change in the legal sectorDavison, who has two decades of experience of technology in the legal sector, became IT director at Farrer & Co in 2008. “It’s a great place to work,” he says. “People who didn’t work here would think it’s a stuffy environment. But it’s a very friendly firm, with a great work-life balance, which is unusual for the high-pressure world of the legal sector.”
Staff turnover at the company is low, and Davison has spent longer at Farrer & Co than in any other position. He recognises that change in the law industry has not been as rapid as in other sectors, such as media and marketing. Yet Davison also says key areas of technology transformation – including mobility and on-demand IT – have affected the business.
“There was a time not so long ago when no one in a legal firm used a BlackBerry,” he says. “That’s changed and there’s also a growing recognition of the importance of the cloud. Legal IT direc-tors, sadly, are still often risk-averse and like to follow the lead of other firms. But change is slowly coming and people are taking a different stance.”
Davison’s willingness to adopt the cloud at Farrer & Co means he considers his role to be a kind of trailblazer for the sector. “We’re pushing forward and doing things that other firms are only starting to consider – we’re definitely leading the way,” he says.
“I’m not a hands-on IT director. I focus on ideas and strategies, rather than implementing the systems. I rely on my team to man-age operational concerns. I run project boards, speak to the busi-ness and partners to understand their key priorities, and think about how technology can be used to help meet those objectives.”
It is an important conversation because, as is the case at most law firms, IT is not uppermost in the minds of most employees. “They’re lawyers – they don’t want to be IT specialists,” he says. “They rely on you coming up with ideas and driving things forward. Since I’ve been here, we’ve changed pretty much everything.”
Getting the building blocks rightDavison says technology transformation started with the foun-dations. Core IT systems, such as infrastructure, servers and net-works, had to be replaced. Most of that work took place behind the scenes, but the rest of the firm started to see improvements in stability and performance.
At the same time, the IT team reviewed its service contracts. Davison says the firm was using about 80 suppliers when he joined, which he says was too many for a business of Farrer & Co’s size. The firm today has a turnover of £54m and employs 400 people, 71 of them partners.
“Cutting IT costs produces big, visible wins for the CEO,” says Davison. “That foundation work gave the business confidence that we could take on more interesting challenges.” Those new tests relate to the IT transformation that Davison and his team have pushed through during the past four years.
One key area of change has been around workflow. Farrer & Co used to rely heavily on paper. The induction of new clients could take as many as two days and involved completing multi-ple forms. The organisation automated the workflow using Intapp Flow business process management software – and the induction process now takes three minutes.
INTERVIEW
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 12
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
Taking document management to the cloudDavison improved the workflow with the implementation of elec-tronic document management (EDM) technology. He installed NetDocuments’ cloud-based EDM system, with Kodak i3000 Series scanners and Capture Pro software. The technology is another step in the firm’s ambitions to become paper-light.
“We knew this was going to be a key project,” says Davison. “Lots of firms change their document management system, but we wanted to do something different. We looked at how the busi-ness worked and decided to implement electronic filing.”
He says early buy-in from the business was crucial. “I put together a project board of 11 people, including partners, solici-tors and secretaries, and we undertook a comprehensive review of document management. We realised it would be core in our attempts to introduce electronic filing,” says Davison.
The project board assessed seven systems and shortlisted three. After a request for proposals and in-house demonstrations, the technologies were scored against 17 different criteria. “It was really important that the project team chose the technology they thought was right for the firm,” says Davison, whose IT team implemented the EDM system in 2014.
“We undertook a large amount of business analysis because we knew we were making significant changes to the way people worked with files. Our analysts went out into the business to find out and understand how people worked with paper files,” he says. “Once we had that information, we could start to think about the look and feel of NetDocuments, and how we could replicate a paper file on screen.”
Reaping the business benefits of on-demand ITThe firm’s approach to electronic filing produced big divi-dends. Scanning volumes are up 25% since the project started. Efficiency and flexibility, says Davison, are the other key ben-efits. “People can now get to their files from any location,” he says. “Everyone can continue to work on documents, whether they’re at work, at home or on the road.”
Farrer & Co’s move to the cloud has already yielded consider-able advantage beyond everyday working. The organisation’s offices are near Holborn in central London, where an electrical fault last year led to an underground fire and a power outage in the area. But while Davison and his team battled to restore sys-tems at the main site, the lawyers continued to access files elec-tronically through the cloud.
“staff can now get to their files froM any location. everyone can continue to work on docuMents,
whether they’re at work, at hoMe or on the road”
Neil DavisoN, Farrer & Co
INTERVIEW
❯The role of IT in making digital transformation projects work.
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 13
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News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
“That situation proved the cloud could help mitigate risk,” he says. “There was a lot of work in the firm to prove that going on-demand was safe. Internal communications helped ensure people were comfortable. But we sold on-demand IT as a ‘hosted solution’ – we didn’t even use the term ‘cloud’.”
Davison says that, in reality, there is little difference between using the cloud and hosting data in a tradi-tional, off-site datacentre. The firm did pay care-ful attention to regulations and contracts. Yet Davison says the external suppliers he uses – such as NetDocuments – are sophisti-cated data managers.
“These external firms are used to work-ing with business information – they deal with major organisations all over the world,” he says. “These providers are experts. They boast a level of security that we could never hope to match. Our docu-ments are far more secure than they ever would be on-site.”
Embracing mobility and innovationDavison is now allying the flexibility of cloud-based infrastruc-ture to mobile technology. The firm deployed Apple iPhones to users last year and is evaluating tablet devices. “We’re adding more and more software to the cloud, which will mean our law-yers will be able to do pretty much everything, from anywhere, on a phone or a tablet,” he says.
Lawyers already have access to email and calendar. Other key applications, such as Big Hand dictation software, time-recording applications and electronic filing, are also available through the cloud. Davison anticipates moving to Microsoft Office 365 next year to provide on-the-go access to enterprise productivity appli-
cations. He has bigger plans for key systems, too.“In two years, I’d like to think we’ll be moving our
datacentre off-site,” he says. “We’ve already seen the benefits of moving document man-
agement to the cloud. Keeping information on-site doesn’t add any value to the busi-ness. Having people in-house to tinker with boxes and servers offers nothing. It makes more sense to deploy talented IT workers on business-facing projects.”
Davison is keen to look into areas that might sometimes be seen as beyond the
realm of a traditional legal firm. “This sec-tor is fairly conservative and isn’t particularly
innovative,” he says. “But we could do a lot more work in areas such as artificial intelligence to under-
stand in detail the documents that we hold.” The potential use of artificial intelligence remains at the con-
cept stage, but Davison is keen to keep a watchful eye on devel-opments. “We need to make sure we retain the right ethos – and that’s all about client focus,” he says. “We must continue to work closely with the business to ensure we deliver to their demands around efficiency, mobility and flexibility.” n
INTERVIEW
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Charles Dickens was a client of Farrer & Co
computerweekly.com 2-8 February 2016 14
Home
News
Mars court documents reveal extent of Oracle licence probe
London’s super sewer infrastructure managed in private cloud
The law firm that served Charles Dickens takes a very modern approach to technology
Editor’s comment
Buyer’s guide to containers and microservices
Market disruption in the age of the digital business model
NAS or object storage: Which to choose for large volumes of unstructured data?
Downtime
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The tribulations of technological change
In many ways it is a shame that the most likely reason for a technology company to hit the headlines in national newspapers and on TV is because it doesn’t pay enough taxes.
For all the largely justified criticism of Google’s £130m tax settlement with the UK government, surely most people in the technol-ogy community would rather be reading about the great innovations from Google et al, and how they are changing the way we live and work for the better (mostly).
But the tax argument is nonetheless one that demonstrates the scope of the technological disruption facing society and how the digital revolution will force governments, companies and individuals to re-evaluate many of the old norms we have taken for granted.
At its heart, the Google tax debate rests on an accounting principle, not a technical one – the ability for country subsidiaries of a multi-national corporation to shift the point of profit to a lower-tax regime. It can’t be beyond lawmakers to legislate to restrict internal service charges so that profits are recorded at the point of consumption for goods and services, not of delivery.
But until technology made it so easy to split consumption and delivery of digital services, it was barely an issue. When Apple launched the mobile app era in 2008, who could have predicted that one outcome just eight years later would be French
taxi drivers burning tyres on a Paris ring road because a piece of software – Uber – is threatening their livelihoods? For all the excitement about the great innovations we are using and those yet to be created, it’s almost impossible to predict the true
social and business impact they will have – only that there will be huge upheavals as we absorb these new capabilities into our lives. We hear plenty of scaremongering about the potential effects of robots and artificial intelligence, but think too about developments
like the internet of things and how that could empower individuals like never before with information about the world around them. Governments and legislators will always react too slowly, even with so much evidence of the pace of digitally inspired social change
in front of them. There are digital King Canutes everywhere. The only certainty is that taxation will not be the only social tenet that is challenged by technological change in the years ahead. As a society, we need to be prepared for further upheavals that few are likely to predict. n
Bryan Glick, editor in chief
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T o innovate in customer engagement and to drive and adapt to digital disruption, enterprises must continu-ously change at increasing velocity.
Application development and delivery professionals must increase their velocity too, while also maintaining – better yet, improving – the quality and resiliency of what they deliver. Large web-native and mobile-native players such as Netflix, Amazon, Google, PayPal, Uber, eBay and Yahoo, as well as start-ups and, increasingly, a broader community of enterprises are changing their software architectures to meet the challenge of continuous business innovation.
There are two major sides to this challenge – how and what. For the how, agile development and continuous delivery improve software delivery processes. For the what, application program-ming interfaces (APIs), containers and microservices improve software flexibility and deployment, providing a central founda-tion for a quiet revolution in software delivery and stability.
Why microservices are importantContrast microservices with monolithic applications. The dis-tinction between them is, first of all, one of deployment, but it may also be a design distinction.
For example, a Java-based web application can be written as a collection of well-designed, modular Java classes. However, these classes are not designed for independent deployment, so all of them get packaged into one large file for deployment. Microservices refactor an application into a series of smaller, sep-arately deployable units.
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Applications built out of independently deployable modules are the future of flexible solution development, as Randy Heffner explains
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There are four major benefits to microservices. First, when individual parts of a system are sepa-rately deployed, they can also be separately scaled. A system might need 20 running instances for one service and only two instances of another. Wal-Mart credits Node.js-based microservices for its ability to handle Black Friday volume spikes when other retailers had issues.
Second, separately deployed services can be implemented using entirely different platforms or design models. One service might need a huge in-memory database and a specialised pro-gramming language, while another might have a very small foot-print and be written in JavaScript on Node.js. The order history service of Amazon’s retail store takes this principle further, using different implementations for recent orders and for older orders.
Third, when services are being run separately, it is more difficult for the whole system to go down at the same time, and a failure in processing one customer’s request is less likely to affect other customers’ requests. This is particularly true since each service’s operation can be optimised for its specific scale, performance, security and transaction management requirements. Netflix, for example, ensures resilience by periodically knocking out its own production services to be sure that the whole keeps running.
And fourth, microservices also offer more options for incremen-tal development and deployment. Agile methods – and particu-larly continuous delivery – can move more quickly when parts of a system can be built and deployed independently. But even with waterfall development, a bug fix is easier to deploy with
microservices. Prior to production deployment, smaller units of development allow for smaller tests, more frequent testing, more options for test-ing and more frequent feedback.
Components, APIs – or bothIndustry discussions on microservices are quite vague concerning what they actually are. Breaking
the word into its two parts helps to clarify the debate. The “services” part of “microservices” has three potential mean-
ings. First, “service” means a component-based, container-based deployable unit. This definition of microservices borrows heavily from early-2000s concepts of components, including the notion of marketplaces for components. However, it pushes beyond component-based development into individual deployment of each component. Operating system-level container technologies such as Docker are emerging as a primary means to structure an application as a collection of relatively small, separately deploya-ble units. In this context, “service” is used in a general and generic sense of “doing something useful”.
Second, “service” means an API or messaging destination. In this definition of microservices, “service” is used in the specific sense of a network-accessible function, as with APIs, service-oriented architecture (SOA), application messaging and message-oriented middleware (MOM). Most commonly, the implication is that the microservice would be a JSON/REST-based API, but other mes-saging styles and payload formats are also valid (AMQP, MQTT, SOAP, XML, Google Protocol Buffers, etc).
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Third, “service” means both a component and an API. The first two definitions given here may be used together or separately. For example, microservices providing mobile APIs running on Node.js were behind Wal-Mart’s 2013 “no downtime on Black Friday” success story. The component definition is more important for deployment flexibility. The API definition helps mainly with appli-cation layering.
The “micro” part of the term is harder to clarify, but it does not necessarily mean small. A microservice should do one thing well – from the point of view of the service user – and this may be as small as a type-ahead API or as big as an API to initiate a com-plete e-commerce order fulfilment process. The real point is how size interacts with a system’s amenabil-ity to change. For this, one should begin with the two central principles of good software design: high cohe-sion and low coupling.
High cohesion is achieved by keeping together in one unit the things that change together. Low coupling is achieved by designing so as to maximise the degree to which unit A’s implementation can change without affecting the design or implementation of other units that refer to unit A.
A unit’s size fits with the microservices concept if it is highly cohesive, with loose coupling to other units. For service users, the order fulfilment API achieves low coupling by insulating them from ongoing changes in order processing. For developers build-ing the internals behind the order fulfilment API, low coupling will
make it appropriate to divide the API’s internal implementation into multiple separately deployable microservices.
How to start down the path to microservicesMicroservices are emerging as an important part of the solution architecture for rapid and scalable response to business and technology change. But moving to micro services is not simple. It’s a journey.
The investments in and benefits from microservices can vary widely and, at the high end, can be quite high and strategic. Wal-Mart’s backing of the Node.js-based Hapi project represents an
investment of more than $2m— and this is just one part of Wal-Mart’s microservice investment.
The microservice architectures for the Netflix and Amazon retail ser-vices are not merely online exten-sions, but rather the foundations of both businesses’ core business
models. If enterprise use of microservices is limited in some way – for example, in a context where the rate of change is relatively low or for a contained mobile app context – an initial foray into micros-ervices may provide limited benefit while allowing the organisa-tion to take on the microservice risks and challenges one by one. n
This article is an extract of the Forrester July 2015 report, “Microservices have an
important role in the future of solution architecture”, by vice-president and principal
analyst Randy Heffner.
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the real point is how size interacts with a systeM’s
aMenability to change
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Digital is one of those terms that mean different things to different people, depending on the point under dis-cussion or the corner fought. But its use also seems to depend on which part of the business you work
for. Marketing, for example, tends to apply it to how customers engage with the brand, and the proposition that brand offers to its customers via online channels.
IT, on the other hand, generally uses digital to refer to technol-ogy and platforms such as cloud, mobile and big data, which tend to be linked to the internet in various ways and give users access to new products and services.
But what is common to all these definitions is the way digital technology provides more ways for people and businesses to connect than ever before. This situation has led consumers to become much more vocal and demanding about what they want, giving them more control over their own customer experience.
A third characteristic of digital relates to market disruption. Organisations such as Uber and Airbnb, for instance, have become bywords for the digital age after undercutting incumbents in the taxi and hotel industries respectively, shaking up these markets in the process.
Meanwhile, as to where the average UK company is in terms of embracing digital transformation, it appears there remains a lot of work to be done. According to management consultancy PA Consulting’s Digital Barometer, which looks at how organisations are adapting to the digital age, 78% of the 400 firms questioned classed themselves as somewhere between “digital dabblers” and “digitising today”.
Disruption in the age of the digital business model
People and organisations are connecting in more ways than ever and IT has transformed businesses old and new, writes Cath Everett
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Of that group, 62% were keen to find ways to create new products, services and even business models using digital technology. On the downside, though, only 18% said they understood what this would mean for their organisation and less than 30% felt they had the right approach internally to succeed. Legacy technology and a lack of appropri-ate skills were also seen as a drag on change.
Leap in awarenessBut PA Consulting’s Kevin O’Shaughnessy says that, over the past 12 to 18 months, he has seen a leap in awareness of the issues – especially at senior levels – and industries such as retail, travel and retail banking were now moving fast.
“For incumbents, the drivers are defending their customer base, cutting costs and making themselves appear more relevant and modern,” says O’Shaughnessy. “New firms, on the other hand, are trying to steal market share and scale up to become bigger. So there is a polarisation there.”
While the low capital investment required to deploy online technologies and cloud services is making it easier for startups to make money out of new ideas, more established firms are finding they need to experiment to get it right.
William Fellows, research vice-president at analyst firm 451 Research, says: “The biggest challenge for many companies is cultural – organisational resistance, conventional budgeting and the like. There is also the issue of where you put your money down and which digital initiative is the best use of your resources.”
A key consideration – whether the company cul-ture supports it or not – is how to introduce change quickly, rather than risk being left behind. An increasingly common approach is to set up joint ventures with third parties, create internal incuba-tor/accelerator models to support new ideas, or even just set up a skunkworks project, says Fellows.
“It’s not really a technology problem,” he says. “There’s lots of technology out there already. It’s really more about how you use and implement it to exploit new opportunities.”
Case study: GLH HotelsGLH Hotels employs technology in a deliberate attempt to stand out from the crowd in the hospitality industry – which has invested little in this area for the past 10 years.
The company, which operates the Thistle, Amba and Clermont hotel chains, employs about 2,000 staff.
It began its technical transformation in 2012 after chief execu-tive Mike DeNoma joined the company from the banking sector.
He brought in Chris Hewertson as his chief technology officer to lead the shift from a traditional IT department with ageing infra-structure that spent most of its time fire-fighting, to a modern function that could help support business growth.
Hewertson says: “The hospitality industry was disrupted years ago by the online travel industry and was very slow to adapt, but it’s now further down the disruption route than many other sec-tors. The disruption caused by organisations like Airbnb is now second-generation.”
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He wanted to use technology to realise the ambition of turning the organisation into “a leading hotel company with a successful brand that would attract other hotels to be managed by the busi-ness”. Another goal was to optimise customer service and use that to differentiate the business.
Rather than go for a traditional technology roadmap that started with the focus on head office, it was decided to begin with the company’s key revenue earners – its hotels.
The company asked three competing teams, comprising mainly hotel staff, to find the best tools and systems to allow them to open a new hotel in a month, says Hewertson. They were given a framework to ensure all the technology would be compatible, and three months to do the discovery work.
The overwhelming decision was to move everything to the cloud, not least because it fitted in with key “ease of use” and improved service levels criteria, he says. So GLH spent the next couple of years decommissioning its existing systems and rolling out new ones –95% of which are now cloud-based.
Another key element of the initiative was to upgrade the com-pany’s online and e-commerce infrastructure and expose its application programming interfaces (APIs) using Apigee’s API platform. The idea here was to share availability and pricing infor-mation directly with online travel agencies, rather than pay inter-mediaries to do so.
The move has not only saved GLH the costs of transaction fees, but accelerated the booking process and reduced the number of errors by removing manual processes such as faxing or emailing booking data, freeing staff to help guests more effectively.
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Ignition Law used digital technology to disrupt the very traditional legal profession and give customers and employees
what they want
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The company has also used its APIs to build a platform called chooseyourownroom.com. This enables guests to choose exactly which room they would like to stay in at any of four London hotels, based on what the room looks like, the view from the window and other guest reviews.
More hotels and website features will be added in the first half of 2016 and the eventual aim is to expand support to third-party hotel chains.
“Digital technology touches every-thing these days,” says Hewertson. “It’s about how we help our employ-ees to be more productive and how our guests interact with us to get the best possible service. Digital is eve-rything we do.”
Case study: Ignition Law“Practising law is a fixed cost-intensive business and is very tra-ditional in how it operates,” says Alex McPherson, co-founder and partner at Ignition Law. “So we re-imagined the model in a lower-cost, more flexible world attractive to talented lawyers.”
The company was established near Tech City in Shoreditch, east London, at the end of 2014 by McPherson and David Farquharson, both of whom were trained by traditional law firms. It has since grown to 15 staff and has 220 clients, about 70% of which are technology companies, 20% operate in the media space and 10% in energy, ranging in size from early startups to £80m businesses.
All the technology that Ignition Law uses, from office applica-tions to telephone conferencing (from MeetingZone) and docu-ment drafting systems, are cloud-based. Taking this approach not only made the business more cost-effective to set up, but also
makes it easier for staff and asso-ciates in countries such as the US, New Zealand and South Africa to work flexibly and remotely under a “white label brand”.
“These technologies are changing the way we practise law, as they allow us to communicate more effectively with clients and to share knowhow,” says partner Rob Stevenson. “So we can now deliver the quick response times that are expected at the top end of the market, but less so in the mid-market where we operate.”
Before setting up the company, McPherson and Farquharson asked clients what they were unhappy about in the existing legal model. The main dissatisfaction was feeling that lawyers were operating in an “ivory tower” rather than being as “lean and cost-effective” as the businesses they were servicing.
As a result, McPherson and Farquharson decided to use tech-nology such as alerts and telephone conferencing to keep clients abreast of what was happening in real time. They introduced monthly retainers, rather than traditional hourly rates, with over-all rates dropping by about 40-50% of the usual.
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“we are trying to enable people to have More fulfilling lives that can be adapted to their
lifestyle, so they don’t have to put up with the status quo”
alex MCPhersoN, igNitioN law
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“The macro-economic climate is changing and we’re one of a number of law firms changing with it,” says McPherson. “But we welcome the different entrants as they are effecting behavioural change. It’s like turning an oil tanker – it’s only just starting to hap-pen and it takes time, but the reality is that what we’re doing is taking a disruptive approach to the industry.”
Another key consideration in setting up Ignition was to enable lawyers to work more flexibly than is usually the case in the legal profession. “We are trying to enable people to have more fulfilling lives that can be adapted to their lifestyle, so they don’t have to put up with the status quo – and that’s only possible due to tech-nology,” says McPherson.
Interestingly, although the firm had expected to be of most inter-est to “newly qualified millennials”, its top recruits have proved to be “high-calibre mums and dads”, either returning to work or wanting employment on a part-time basis. Only six people work in Ignition’s London office, with the rest located elsewhere.
The company’s aim is to at least treble the number of employ-ees next year – and double its revenues. “Our clients feel more empowered as they have more transparency, and we are more cost-efficient purely because of technology,” says McPherson. “But as lawyers, we also feel more empowered and rejuvenated as we are more in touch with our clients and feel we are genuinely part of a wider community here.” n
GLH Hotels uses application programming interfaces for
a platform which lets guests choose their own room
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Object storage is a fashionable topic, boosted by its massive scale-out capability and its related ability to handle very large amounts of unstructured data. Object technology now underpins much cloud stor-
age, for example.However, file-based network-attached storage (NAS) remains
widely used and sees continued development with the advent of clustered NAS, and it too is targeted at use cases that involve large amounts of unstructured data.
So how do you differentiate and choose between the two? Will everything trend towards object storage, or are there application areas where NAS will remain supreme? Or is this a false dichot-omy, with object storage and NAS merely being two views on the same thing?
The two are overlapping more and more. Many object stor-age systems also offer file (and block) interfaces, while high-end NAS employs many of the same infrastructure elements that make object storage possible, most notably scale-out technol-ogy. There are even systems, such as NetApp’s latest iteration of StorageGrid, that allow users to write data as a file and read it back as an object.
Indeed, there are strong grounds to argue that object stor-age is merely file storage done right. After all, the original NAS
NAS or object storage for large volumes of unstructured data?Both NAS and object storage offer highly scalable file
storage for large volumes of unstructured data, but which is right for your environment?
Bryan Betts reports
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file systems left a lot to be desired and still have issues, despite being upgraded and updated over the years.
For example, even though we have migrated from the 8.3 filenames format imposed by MS-DOS to the flexible formats allowed today, we can still fool computers into running malware by giving a file a different extension.
Some in the business have even suggested the proponents of object storage did it a disservice by giving it a new name. Had they instead called it an enhanced file system, it would have looked a lot less scary and unfamiliar to many potential users. Of course, it might also have looked a lot less innovative and intriguing to others.
NAS versus object: Balancing the scalesThe first scale-related aspect to consider is that the larger, older and more unstructured your data store is, the more likely it is to be suited to object storage. Conversely, NAS may be a simpler and better-performing option for fast-changing data or small stores.
Object storage enables enterprises and service providers to man-age multi-petabyte secondary storage with relative ease. This does not directly compete with traditional file and block storage for serv-ing frequently-accessed data and transactional workloads.
In addition, when we refer to storage performance, we usu-ally think in terms of speed, latency and throughput in the data-centre. This is very different to the cloudy world of distributed
applications and clients, where mobile devices typically access data over long distances and from widely disparate locations.
The second differentiator is geographic scale. In the distributed world we need distributed storage performance and throughput. This is something that distributed object storage architectures can supply effectively, thanks to a combination of fast
and reliable object streaming, load balancing and various cach-ing mechanisms that enable support for a multitude of concur-rent clients simultaneously. Add Rest-based protocols such as Amazon S3, and it makes object storage particularly efficient for remote devices.
Meanwhile, however, there is no doubt that scale-out NAS deployment to very large volumes of data is thoroughly achiev-able. Indeed, in many cases it is now the primary option for huge volumes of file data in a highly scalable clustered file system.
Scale-out NAS offers significant advantages over traditional, or scale-up, NAS. Traditional NAS is based on discrete file sys-tem instances, and is limited in terms of hardware scalability. Meanwhile, scale-out NAS allows expansion of its parallel file system across clusters of hardware nodes, with the ability to grow capacity and performance independently, often to petabyte scale.
An object lesson in fault toleranceScale-out capability, therefore, keeps NAS competitive for larger data volumes. Of course the scale-out metaphor is also the norm for object storage, although object platforms such as Ceph and
OBJECT STORAGE
❯Object storage is a rising star in data storage, especially for cloud and web use. We look at the pros
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Scality operate in somewhat different ways from scale-out NAS. Where NAS uses Raid to stripe and mirror data for data protec-tion, they instead distribute and replicate objects (file data plus associated metadata) across storage nodes available to them, using fault-tolerant technologies known as forward error correc-tion (FEC) or erasure coding.
An issue for NAS and Raid is that as disk drives grow in capacity to meet the ongoing data explosion, the system’s ability to survive loss of drives becomes ever more tenu-ous. In the days when rebuilding a drive meant reassembling a few gigabytes of data, the time required was tolerable.
But with drives now in the tera-bytes, a rebuild can mean pull-ing several hundred times more data over an interface only 10 or 20 times faster than it was in the days of LVD parallel SCSI. As rebuild times grow, so does the risk of a second drive failure, and protecting against that also greatly increases the cost and complexity involved.
In contrast, object storage is generally less efficient in its use of physical storage capacity and typically stores each object three times for resilience. It can use distributed nodes, however, and distributes the data (which can improve performance) and the risk. Data can also reside on commodity storage, which brings down the overall cost.
Data in the cloudSo, there are considerable attractions to an object infrastruc-ture, even if you then use it to provide a file system interface – as indeed many cloud storage providers do. Having said that, NAS is tried and tested. For smaller sites and data volumes, scale-up NAS will remain effective and simple to implement. Similarly, where you need outright performance and low latency in the data-
centre, and for compatibility with today’s applications which expect CIFS or NFS, scale-out NAS is likely to remain king. NAS is also a good option for frequently changing data, because object storage is built with relatively static data in mind.
But while scale-out NAS can pro-vide high performance, it is limited to perhaps a few petabytes and it comes at a cost. In particular, there
is networking complexity and expense, with some already imple-menting 40Gbit Ethernet or InfiniBand for storage traffic.
Once you hit scale, whether in terms of capacity, geographic cov-erage or both, object storage can provide many of the benefits more simply. It can also be more resilient – self-healing erasure coding is faster and more efficient than legacy technologies such as Raid – and will be more useful if you plan private cloud-type applications.
So, for many users, a shift to cloud-oriented object storage, per-haps with a file-oriented overlay, will pay dividends for much of their unstructured data. n
OBJECT STORAGE
object storage is generally less efficient in its use of
physical storage capacity and typically stores each object
three tiMes for resilience
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Remembering David Bowie’s very own ISP, BowieNetWhen news reached us of the sad death of rock icon David Bowie, we were reminded that, ever the talented and fearless innovator when it came to music, Bowie also had an eye for technological innovation. And 18 years ago, what better way was there to inno-vate than to set up one’s very own internet service provider (ISP)?
Few people seem to remember it now, but back in 1998, Bowie set up his own ISP, BowieNet, the world’s first, and so far only, ISP ever to be run by a pop genius – unless Adele is working on something...
The ISP launched with an ambitious – for the time – webcast that featured performances from Ani DiFranco, the Jayhawks, Jesus and
Mary Chain, Spacehog and the Specials, as well as highlights from Bowie’s 50th birthday bash at New York ‘s Madison Square Garden.
It was to offer high-speed internet access across the world, with “uncensored” internet access and an online community and exclu-sive content curated by Rolling Stone, as well as access to Bowie him-self through live chats and video feeds. Users also got a CD-ROM with two classic live audio and video tracks never before released, their own customisable homepage with a generous 20MB allow-ance, and a [email protected] email address.
All things considered, BowieNet had a good run of it, surviving until 2012. Rest in peace, David. You will be greatly missed. n
DOWNTIME
❯Read more on the Downtime blog