Martin Walshaw, F5

Among economic strife, cloud, and BYOD, 2012 was a challenging yet exciting year

According to a Gartner CIO Survey, published in April, 2012 was to be “the year of living hesitantly”, Warren Olivier, territory manager at Veeam Software, pointed out. “According to the report, 85% of CEOs said they believed their enterprises would be impacted by the global economic downturn in 2012,” he said. “The continued economic slowdown has caused some major issues in IT spending, with the mantra of ‘doing more with what you’ve got’ being a strategy for many companies going forward.”

According to Olivier, the deteriorating global economy, in particular the ongoing European debt crisis, has been the biggest factor impacting the South African economy in 2012, leading to a contraction in growth. “Experts are expecting South Africa’s economy to drop to a projected 2.5% growth for this year, before recovering to 3% next year. Strikes in the mining sector – and consequent high wage settlements – didn’t help either, while government’s failure to address corruption undermines the country’s development, which impacts IT.”

CLOUD, CLOUD, CLOUD

The biggest contender that made waves this year was undeniably cloud computing, and all of the trends that emerged as a result of it.

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Patrick Evans, ACT" />Olivier says the cloud finally started arriving in SA this year after being touted as the future of IT for the last two to three years. “With this, conscious thinking arrived about how important it is to be aware of what is going on in that cloud. Companies are trying to get more from virtualisation – not just to reduce electricity, cooling and physical costs, but to also achieve increases in efficiency, reduced downtime and more rapid recovery.”

According to Roelof Louw, cloud expert at T-Systems, in the cloud computing domain there seem to be opposing forces, as there was a definite uptake in migrating core systems to private cloud providers, while at the same time the market reacted with statements that “SA is not cloud-ready” or “no real cloud providers exist in SA”. The increased uptake could be seen in the increased revenue of cloud providers for cloud solutions, he says. “The strong statements against the uptake could also be seen in a positive light, as customers now understand the topic better and hence are starting to ask the difficult questions and even challenge the early adopters’ decisions.”

However, Louw believes there has been a slower cloud uptake locally compared to European and USA markets, and this has set South Africa a few passes back. “Also, the perception of looking north, into Africa, will probably result in a few casualties in missing the window of opportunity. The negative perception of Africa is, well, just that – perception. The African countries have changed, cleaned up their act, have qualified IT resources, albeit that some infrastructure challenges still remain.”

According to Olivier, while cloud is still the buzzword, companies can’t successfully move to a public cloud unless their current virtual infrastructure is built on solid and stable foundations. “If you’re not seeing all the benefits in your virtual environment today, you may not see them in the cloud either,” he stresses.

“Most companies have a very sketchy or skewed view of their infrastructure,” he says. “Until companies understand their environment, it will be very difficult to achieve more effective capacity planning. Companies should try to reduce the amount of hardware purchased and increase their consolidation ratios to get more out of their virtualisation solutions. It seems much easier to just throw more tin at the problem, but this defies the initial thinking around virtualisation, around reducing footprints and easing IT management.”

According to Louw, the focus on cloud has changed business in another significant way, namely, the move towards the services-oriented or business-oriented IT solution from the technology-oriented solutions. “Another is the greater awareness and demand for security solutions or at least integrated security and compliance solutions. The topic of compliance and security was the main concern when IT services were to be sourced from the cloud,” he says.

Karl Reed, chief marketing and solutions officer at Elingo, believes cloud computing is coming on the back of a steadily increasing road warrior workforce. “Not long ago, mainly salespeople were on the road. Today, enterprises want their entire workforce enabled for mobile productivity. You’re seeing everyone from sales and marketing to support and financial clerks going mobile, and using devices like tablets to connect to the enterprise from their customers’ premises. Empowering the mobile workforce means equipping them with efficient mobile devices with serious processing power, and the ability to access their enterprise systems and desktop tools from anywhere, at any time.”

DEVICES EVERYWHERE

The mobile worker trend is also having a dramatic effect on the amount of devices that are seen at home and at work. “A key prediction was that tablet computing would come to the fore. This turned out to be one of the biggest growth areas of the year, and it is showing no signs of slowing down,” says Reed. “As people cut back on the number of devices the  use, we will see more convergence and evolution occurring in these devices – laptops will merge with tablets and tablets will overlap with phones, resulting in new all-in-one devices that streamline computing. And consumer demand will result in the same convergence in the app and software space, as people seek simpler, more streamlined ways to work.”

Roelof Louw, T-Systems

“BYOD was a new acronym for me this year,” says Jeff Fletcher, co-owner of three6five. “The concept is old, but the acronym became more popular. Driven from the executive level down, the requirement to make e-mail, calendars and documents appear on iPads and Android tablets or face the wrath of the person that pays your salary is enough of a threat to make this happen more often than IT administrators are comfortable with. However, corporate networks and software systems are not as fully equipped to manage this new device influx as they were with the desktop PC and Windows XP ecosystem.”

Says Martin Walshaw, F5 senior systems engineer: “As smartphones in South Africa become more affordable, more and more South Africans are moving towards this always connected environment. These intelligent devices are quickly becoming critical to working efficiently, and users want to use their own devices; in fact, they demand it.”

He warns that with these multitudes of different devices, different operating systems and differing capabilities comes the challenge of how to secure your corporate resources in addition to effectively managing these requirements. “This challenge is not going to go away anytime soon, and is top of mind with most corporates today.”

However, ACT CEO Patrick Evans says the IT industry has not embraced mobile devices as part of their delivery platform. “General consumers are downloading applications onto their devices and are having a pleasing experience utilising a tool that is robust, easy to use, in addition to being well supported. The IT industry has failed to deliver a similar experience to their customers. ERP, CRM or even SCM solutions are not the friendliest applications to use, nor are they as individually customisable.”

He believes the challenge that presents itself to software developers is how to incorporate the new look and texture of social applications into their enterprise applications. “Hardware vendors can use the mobile device platform to deliver user enablement, connect customers collaboratively and communicate and support their customer base more effectively,” he says.

According to Fletcher, the BYOD trend has meant a rethinking of enterprise infrastructure security. “This year, the shift went from fight it to figure out how to deal with it,” he says.

SECURITY AND COMPLIANCE

“This year has seen a signifi cant increase in security threats that are socially, politically and economically motivated,” says Walshaw. “As IT is grappling with these trends, employees are requiring access to more and more applications from just about anything with an IP and a screen. When combined with the fact that they are also dealing with key issues such as larger, more complex data centres and limited IT resources, 2013 looks to be a year of breaches, application security and even hacker defections.”

He believes protecting user device  and the carrier service provider network will be essential, as networks migrate to long-term evolution, also commonly referred to as 4G, and all Internet Protocol environments.

“Signalling messages have started to skyrocket due to the usage growth of smartphones, netbooks, tablets and always on/chatty applications. BYOD and the plethora of third party applications will only increase the need for management of the control plane,” he says.

Olivier says: “Another key trend for SA is compliancy – not only in the government sector with regard to the Auditor General, but also in large JSE-listed companies, asking: how can you guarantee recoverability, and do you comply with certain regulatory compliance and reporting requirements around King III, for example?”

He is of the opinion that compliance can be a headache, but can also bring real value, if followed correctly, around minimising costs, risk and disruptions to business. “The cost of unplanned downtime is often very hard to measure, but it adds up to a staggering amount,” he says.

TELKOM’S TOPPLE

According to Fletcher, from a network infrastructure perspective, the biggest change this year was the final toppling of Telkom’s monopoly as the dominant last mile provider in South Africa.

“While this has been a while in the making, with Neotel having come to market with far less of a bang than anyone had hoped, the combined efforts of the MNOs and the fi bre network providers has demonstrated that it is now fairly easy to buy connectivity services in SA that don’t traverse the Telkom network,” he says. “This year we saw the widespread availability of fibre and WiMax alternatives, and the launch of LTE late in the year means that Telkom is now an option, and not the standard. This creates a very different market dynamic and one in which more companies can compete as resellers and aggregators, as they are able to bundle more options for customers. More competition also means a massive price drop; however, the absence of established pricing regimes – apart from the what-Telkom-was-charging-was-just-too-much – has caused some uncertainty among services providers as to what to charge.” He continues: “While it has been the catalyst for the biggest change, it will also be the biggest potential problem. With all the infrastructure that large MNOs, ISPs, corporates, SMEs and consumers have invested in Telkom’s network infrastructure, a collapse in service levels will have far-reaching effects for everyone in the ICT value chain. Telkom needs to lose its monopoly, but not fail entirely.”

WINDOWS AND APPLE

Finally, Evans cites one of the aspects that have not impacted the IT landscape yet, but is going to, as the launch of Windows 8.

“Another event, which I consider to be the beginning of a long battle, is the Samsung and Apple infringement of patent court case. The ‘Patent Wars’ is ultimately going to lead to changes in Patent Law, which is way out of date. Without it, innovation will become stifled.”

He believes the launch of Windows 8 now makes Microsoft a real player in the mobile space. “Globally, Apple IOS and the various flavours of Android are the most prolific in the market. With Microsoft stepping in, it would certainly diversify the market. Their approach has almost been ‘un-Microsoft-like’, with the company partnering and engaging with people, even going as far as paying developers to move applications to their platform. There is certainly a similarity between Android and Apple devices, but the Microsoft devices look and feel different. They have put a lot of thought into how they would like to engage with the market and how they want to position themselves in the market. So far, I like what they are doing, because they have done it differently and are involving a number of forward-thinking aspects into their strategy.”