Breaking the Code

Intelligent Design My Ar*e!

So the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit is winding down.  It's been a hectic few days.  You know that end of conference feeling when everyone is de-mob happy and you really feel for the guy on the graveyard shift (I know I've been there!).  Well this time it is David Williams flying the flag for IT Process Automation so I'd better be there!!

Talking of automation one of the recurrent themes of the conference has been that blindly automating an existing procedure isn't much use - you've got to understand the process you are trying to implement holistically.

I'll give you a great example -

I travel a lot and last Friday I found myself at Heathrow en route to Edinburgh for a stopover to see my family, remind them I exist etc.  Anyway I pitched up at T3 and because I was changing airlines I had to collect my baggage then make my way to T5 rather than stay air side.  So I got the train and when I came out of the underground station I went up the escalator and ended up in arrivals by mistake.  No problem I thought and I followed the signs until I found the lift (elevator) I should have taken from the station to departures.

Instead of a pair of up/down call buttons there was a  sign saying "Lifts stop Automatically" which had been crudely sellotaped to the panel.  Bit tacky I thought but hey its early days and at least they've implemented a smart lift.  So I waited.  The first lift arrived and the light above the doors indicated it was going down so I waited for the next one.  This happened a couple more times so I took a closer interest in the lifts.  Since these were in a funky glass & steel housing I could see lifts going up but for some reason not stopping automatically on my floor.

Eventually I figured that for some reason there was a bug in their system so I got a lift going down and sure enough it then went up automatically to the departures level bypassing the arrivals floor altogether.

As I got out I bumped into a BAA staff member and said "I think there is a problem with your lift.  It doesn't appear to be stopping on the intermediate level going up".

She said "No. There is no problem.  It is designed to take people from arrivals down to the underground station and from the underground station to departures.  Look there is a sign in the lift that explains this." 

Sure enough there was another crudely sellotaped sign on the panel in the lift with a diagram illustrating that the lift went from floor -1 to +1 then from floor +1 to 0 and on to -1.

When I had the temerity to point out that being stuck on the 0 floor I would have to have got into a lift going the wrong way to see this sign she shrugged her shoulders and said "That's BAA for you!" and walked off.

In the words of that redoubtable character Jim Royle from the Royle Family, "Intelligent Design My Arse"!!

Drinking your own Champagne

I am writing this at the Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations & Management Summit in Florida.

This is the second year Gartner has run this event and for an ISV in the IT Process Automation space it is the Gartner event so we are here in force along with some of our competitors as well as one of our OEM partners Unisys Corporation.

Unisys have licensed our Enigmatec Management System (EMS) as Unisys uOrchestrate™ which is a key component of their Infrastructure Management Suite.

While this is hardly earth shattering news what is worth noting - and the reason for this post - is that Unisys are drinking their own vintage champagne and have deployed our Enigmatec Virtual Orchestrator (EVO) internally.  In the words of Brian Ott (CTO, Systems & Technology, Unisys) they are "now able to deliver 95 percent of requests for virtual machines within ten minutes, completely hands-free.  EVO has transformed our business and dramatically improved the speed at which we deliver solutions to our customers."  (If you happen to be at the Gartner show you can catch Brian Ott here.)

Rather than rely on our ROI calculator Unisys commissioned their own case study which estimated that this deployment will save them $3m over the next three years.  This is modest compared with the savings of some of our large enterprise customers but is nevertheless an important milestone for Unisys themselves.

The bottom line is that, while we have proven solutions now in production around the world managing mission critical business services, as we move forward strategic business partnerships are vital to our growth and, in turn, the internal adoption of our solutions by our partners is key to their success.

In the case of Unisys the speed with which they have embarked on their internal roll out and the immediate payback they are seeing demonstrates that drinking your own champagne is definitely in.

In line with current TTB policy it should be noted that this posting is not intended to encourage you to drink or to increase your alcohol consumption for health reasons.

The Problem with Blogs

It has been a while since my last post.  Well over a year to be exact.

The problem with blogs of course is that if you are not careful a week or two passes between posts then a month or more and before you know it you are in that classic situation where you are too embarrassed to blog!

It's the same with people - you bump into someone you haven't seen for a while and agree to meet up for a drink then leave it so long - having sworn blind that you'll call them the very next day of course - that you can't bring yourself to call.  That's how people drift apart and that's my excuse - feeble though it is - for leaving it this long.

So what has galvanized me into retrieving my account, recovering my password and logging on to Typepad after all this time?  To find out you'll have to read my next blog.

In the meantime I'll leave you with one of my all time favorite poems - Days by Philip Larkin

What are days for?
Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Cool poem?  Philip Larkin was also a pretty well known jazz critic in his day.  I think he would have liked Kate Edmonson who I caught at Eddie V's in Austin last Wednesday.  How is that for serendipity?