InformationWeek 2011 02 28

Creative destruction visits Cisco 6 | HPs data warehouse muddle 14 | Dr.
Dobbs: iPhones table trouble 31 | Is IPv6 a Y2K redux? 39 | Non-tech companies join the M&A party 48
THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY
FEB. 28, 2011
By Chris Murphy p.19
informationweek.com
[PLUS] SALARY SURVEY PREVIEW
What matters most to IT pros p.46
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CONTENTS
THE BUSINESS VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY Feb. 28, 2011 Issue 1,292
[QUICKTAKES]
10 12
SAP: From App To Platform

Its software development kit aims to broaden SaaS suites impact
COVER STORY
IT Is Too Darn Slow

Is your shop where great business ideas grind to a halt? Heres how CIOs are pushing to speed things up.
Down On The FarmVille

Merger of Membase and CouchOne highlights games big data tactics
VMwares Hybrid Cloud Plan

New interface manages VMs in private and public cloud
14
HPs Data Warehouse Muddle

Vertica deal is a good step, but its broad strategy is still unclear
19
12
informationweek.com
Feb. 28, 2011 1
[CONTENTS] 4 6
Research And Connect
Reports from InformationWeek Analytics, events, and more
Global CIO
Ciscos core business stumbles as it moves beyond networking
39
Next-Gen Net
IPv4 is on its way out, IPv6 is inand dawdling will cost you
31 Table Trouble 8 46 48
CIO Profiles
Medicine made via biological processes is the next big thing, says Teva Pharmaceuticals CIO
Presenting tabular data is a big challenge on mobile handsets
Practical Analysis
IT pros are changing their minds about what matters most in a job
Down To Business
Non-tech companies are getting into the tech M&A mix .
upcoming events: Interop

Get up to speed on IT innovations in cloud computing, virtualization, security, networking, and more at Interop. interop.com/lasvegas
May 8-12 in Las Vegas
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2 Feb. 28, 2011
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4 Feb 28, 2011
globalCIO
BOB E VANS
Cisco Zapped By Destructive Power Of Innovation

funny thing has happened to Cisco on gest that sales of the companys largest its way to creating the consumer-dri- switching platform, the Catalyst 6500, ven human network: Its core enter- slowed at the end of 2010 as the product rapprise business has begun to buckle under the idly become uncompetitive from a price and weight of massive costs, relentless competi- functionality perspective. Responding to this tion, and prices that have dropped faster than trouble like a SWAT team, Cisco did finally volume sales can rise. migrate customers to its hot new product In each of Ciscos past three quarters, in- lines, the Nexus switch family and the ASR vestors have hammered John Chambers routers family. Both of these are more comcompany for failing to match the strong dou- petitivebut at much lower margin. Ouch! ble-digit revenue growth he predicted and for So because it was notand perhaps still is also failing to manage costs as effectively as notkeeping pace with the requirements it typically has done. and demands of its customers, Ciscos highMeanwhile, networking sales for Cisco ri- margin legacy products are being cannibalvals such as Hewlett-Packard and Juized by its new gear, which offers the BAL C niper Networks have boomedso performance levels customers need O I L whats Ciscos core problem? yet cant deliver the profit margins On MoneyMorning.com, ininvestors demand. And this deepvestment analyst Jon D. Markseated problem, says Markman, is man writes: The really big probnot going away anytime soon. lem for Ciscoas is true of so This is not a problem that can many large, sclerotic companies that be fixed in three months, he count on the government for a lot of writes, because recession-hardened their businessis that the prices that the customers arent willing to pay the premifirm can charge for its core business are drop- ums Cisco used to be able to command ping faster than sales. and competitors like HP and Juniper are Think about that for a moment. Revenue more than willing to ensure that pricing for switchesa huge part of Ciscos busi- pressure only intensifies. nessfell. That was bad enough. But marAnd as a result, We are watching the degins thinnedwhich is even worse. structive force of innovation at work. How can this be? Ciscos traditional cusIts ironic indeed that Cisco, which over tomers are frantically expanding their use of the past couple of decades has helped thouonline communications and networks for sands of customers unleash that very same everything from collaborative design to meet- destructive force of innovation on their ings to research to blueprints and so much competitors, is now feeling some of the more. Why has Cisco not been able to exploit blunt-force trauma of innovations unyieldthis market demand more aggressively? ing edge. It appears that Cisco, which for the past 15 years has sold products, services, and know- Bob Evans is senior VP and director of how that helped its customers in every in- InformationWeeks Global CIO unit. For dustry accelerate their pace of business, failed more Global CIO perspectives, go to to take its own medicine. informationweek.com/global-cio, or write to As Markman writes: Channel checks sug- Bob at bevans@techweb.com.
O
G
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While John Chambers company has branched far beyond networking, that core business has stumbledand rivals are pouncing
6 Feb. 28, 2011
CIOprofiles
Career Track
How long at current company: Eight years Career accomplishment Im most proud of: Transforming Teva USAs legacy platform into a common integrated platform of real-time systems. This boosted our ability to integrate acquired companies into our common platform at a speed that becomes a competitive advantage. Most important career influencer: Bill Marth, president and CEO of Teva, for his insight into the business operation and decision-making process. Bill is able to get buy-in across the organization. He does this through his ability to clearly articulate his vision, letting him rally people in support. Decision Id like to do over: There are some hiring decisions I wish I had a second chance at. Resources are a precious commodity, and making a hire that doesnt fit is a drain on the organization. If a person doesnt have the core values and behavior that mesh with the vision of the company, it wont work out.
Read other CIO Profiles at informationweek.com/topexecs
notebooks and manufacturing execution systems. This will allow automation of the weighing and dispensing of raw materials into the drug production process. >> A fully automated, high-availability platform to let our businesses recover faster after a disruption. How I measure IT effectiveness: We use the typical IT measures of scope, budget, ROI, schedule, etc.but ultimately its our ability to add real value and meet the needs of our business that determines if were effective.
Vision
JIMMY Z. WANG
VP and CIO, Teva Pharmaceuticals Americas
Colleges/degrees: Southern Methodist University, PhD Favorite sport: Basketball Business leader Id like to have lunch with: Jack Welch, General Electrics former leader Smartphone of choice: BlackBerry Last vacation: China Tech vendor exec I respect most: Googles Eric Schmidt
The next big thing for my industry: Recent FDA regulations and healthcare reform are paving the way for biologicsmedicinal products created by biological processes. These are important medicines and represent a huge market and tremendous therapeutic value to patients. However, biologics are much more difficult to develop and manufacture than traditional chemical medicines. The governments top tech priority should be ... Besides security, from a pure IT perspective, the government should be focused on consolidation and shared services. Kids and tech careers: A career in IT can certainly be rewarding. Youre viewed as a problem solver. You can be a developer, a network engineer, a project manager, or somewhere in between. You can be hands-on or get into management. My main advice would be that whichever avenue you pursue, make sure you understand the business you support.
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On The Job
IT budget: $90 million Size of IT team: 290 employees Top initiatives: >> Our ePedigree system, which can track and trace all our pharmaceutical products throughout the supply chain, enabling full chain of custody from point of manufacture through consumer sale. >> Automation of our lab and manufacturing processes through the implementation of electronic lab
8 Feb. 28, 2011
Ranked No. 48 in the 2010
[QUICKTAKES]
CLOUD COMPUTING
SAPs ByDesign Moves From App To Platform
AP isnt in a hurry when it comes to moving into cloud computing. Its latest step is adding a software development kit to Business ByDesigns Feature Pack 2.6 update, turning the on-demand business software suite into an application platform. Without the SDK, customers could customize the suites manufacturing, HR, supply chain, sales, marketing, and services applications with capabilities such as rolespecific interfaces, new reports, Web forms, and business-specific processes. With the SDK, SAP envisions a broad ecosystem of partners and customers developing specialized applications for horizontal processes and vertical industries. In a cloud computing context, SAPs new SDK is to ByDesign what the Force.com platform is to Salesforce.com software as a service. Next up will be a Salesforce AppExchange-like app store that SAP is expected to introduce at its Sapphire conference in May. SAP admits its going slow. Wed rather be conservative and have good retention of customers, says Chris Horak, global head of Business ByDesign marketing. We want to make sure theyre happy and cover their needs as opposed to moving too quickly and getting into a churn situation.
10 Feb. 28, 2011
Is SAP being too conservative? It has expanded the customer base from 100 with the launch of ByDesign 2.5 last July to about 250 today. It expects to have about 500 customers by May, and 1,000 by years end. Salesforce, by comparison, surpassed 80,000 customers in 2010, and more than 185,000 partner apps have been built on Force.com. One might say that, for now at least, ByDesign is to Salesforce SaaS as Windows Phone 7 is to the iPhone. Inside The SDK The ByDesign SDK is a Microsoft Visual Studio environment that most developers can easily grasp. Developers will take advantage of the publicly available data types and pro cess definitions inside ByDesign, Horak says. You dont modify the core source code. You customize on top of the platform, he says. Software development partners will contribute specialized applications to the coming app store, and SAP will add so-called extension applications that will complement its on-premises software deployments. First up will be SAP Sales OnDemand, a Salesforce automation that will be able to draw order and inventory data from SAP ERP systems deployed on-premises.
Feature Pack 2.6 also provides an option that lets large companies running SAP Business Suite use on-
ing the platform that supports application services. As a data management platform, ByDesign is based
Extension Apps Planned

>> Sales OnDemand for sales-force automation;
first half 2011
>> Travel OnDemand for expense reporting;

second half 2011
>> Sourcing OnDemand, new version of supplier

management app; second half 2011
>> Career OnDemand for HR and talent management; 2012
demand integration to consolidate financial data from smaller subsidiaries running ByDesign. ByDesigns shift in emphasis to platform capabilities is in sync with a trend recently identified by Accenture. The age of viewing IT through an application lens is coming to an end, the consulting firm says in its Technology Vision 2011 report. Instead, platform architectures will be selected based on their ability to handle soaring volumes of data and complex data management. IT and business leaders will begin to view application services as utilities that can be procured off the shelf, says Gavin Michael, Accentures managing director of R&D and alliances. The roles of application and data will be reversed, with data becom-
on the same in-memory, column-store technology used in the SAP high-performance analytics appliance and earlier BusinessObjects Explorer and SAP (HANA) Accelerator appliances. The key advantage in both HANA and ByDesign is real-time access to transactional data, an advantage SAP expects to bring to its entire application portfolio as the technology matures and is scaled up. A ByDesign 3.0 release is set for August. Theres little doubt it will bring new functionality and SDK flexibility. But dont expect SAP to stoke too much fervor for its on-demand software. Having a service-based platform may be the key to the future, but in the here and now, SAP still has software to sell. Doug Henschen
(dhenschen@techweb.com)
informationweek.com
[QUICKTAKES]
COUCHBASE
Merged Startups Play Well With Big DataGame
f you have problems managing huge quantities of data quickly, is it possible theres a fixin FarmVille? Two startups that focus on quickly handling big data, CouchOne and Membase, have merged to form Couchbase. Membase, a data management system based on open source Memcached, is best known for its use by Zynga, the creator of FarmVille and other social games that took off on Facebook. Zynga hosts 250 million active visitors a month and must capture each ones actions in the game, producing a database thats ap-
proaching a petabyte in size. CouchOne is the company behind the open source document database CouchDB, a NoSQL system that uses Javas JSON-based objects as standard data units. Its often used with blogging systems for its ability to store unstructured data as documents. How could Couchbase, a company with only a few dozen employees, though $17 million in venture capital, help companies manage big data? Think of applying the FarmVille experience very quickly pulling all you know about a persons activity historyto e-commerce.
Pigs, potatoes, and big data
When a visitor goes to a Web site, everything a company knows about that customer could be pulled into the memory of a server cluster. As the customer moves around the site, a background system based on Couchbase might assess what the visitor is trying to do and make the optimum information available. It could be a promotion or self-service customer support. NoSQL systems like CouchDB are fast but typically start with the data on disks, not in memory. If
Couchbase successfully integrates CouchDB and Membase, the promise is to let companies tap the speed of NoSQL and in-memory processing at once. That advance could let companies analyze large amounts of data using the memories of a server cluster, coordinate use of that data, manipulate it to look up and deliver insightsand do it quickly enough to be of use, before the person clicks elsewhere or makes a costly phone call to get support.
Charles Babcock (cbabcock@techweb.com)
CLOUD BURSTING
VMwares Hybrid Cloud Plan: All In The Family

Mware has a new interface, called Cloud Con nector, to manage VMware virtual machines running both on-premises in a private cloud and in remote locations in the public cloud. The problem with this hybrid cloud approach: It works only for VMs running VMware. Cloud Connector is a free plug-in addition to VM wares vSphere 4 on-prem ises management software suite. It gives IT managers a view into any ESX Server VM running in a cloud built with VMwares vCloud Datacenter Services. Administrators can send workloads to service provid12 Feb. 28, 2011
ers using vCloud, which includes public clouds from Verizon and BlueLock in the U.S. and the Colt chain of data centers in 14 cities across Europe. Terremark and SingTel, the Singapore telco, promise to add vCloud Datacenter Services to their cloud services in the near future. Rackspace and AT&T have shown interest in supporting VMware VMs in their cloud services. But Amazons EC2 and Microsofts Azure cloud ser vices dont support vCloud, nor are they likely to in the near future. Cloud Connector should make it easier to transfer workloads that are straining
resources in an enterprise data center to a publicly accessible cloud data center. VMware says that practice, called cloud bursting, is simpler to implement if both locations can host and manage VMware VMs. But several products manage hybrid clouds that work with VMwares and other vendors VMs. Among them, Novells Zenworks Cloud Manager works with VM wares ESX Server, Microsofts Hyper-V, and open source Xen; and Skytaps hybrid cloud management system handles VMware and Citrix VMs. VMware is attempting to position cloud computing as
a complement to its data center offerings, provided its supplied by a compatible cloud provider. With vSphere 4 management and Cloud Connector, admins can view the running virtual server, reassign its resources, and have some assurance that the resources assigned are sufficient to do the job. VMwares contrasting that approach with a more standard infrastructureas-a-service approach, where its harder to see how well a workload is running or to change allocated resources. But in the long run, wouldbe customers might want more public cloud choices.
Charles Babcock (cbabcock@techweb.com)
informationweek.com
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VERTICA DEAL
HPs Murky Move Back Into Data Warehousing
ewlett Packards deal to acquire Vertica follows a string of recent acquisitions in data warehousing, including SAPs $5.8 billion purchase of Sybase and its Sybase IQ data warehousing product, EMCs purchase of Greenplum, and IBMs $1.7 billion acquisition of Netezza. But the HP deal raises plenty of questions about its big-picture strategy, including what it means for HPs partners and what acquisitions could be next for the company. Vertica, among a dozen or so independent vendors that remain in data warehousing, has a lot to offer HP. Its column-store database delivers high data compression for efficient storage and fast querying in analytic applications. Its also low maintenance, able to get up and running quickly and maintain performance with less tuning than required by conventional relational databases, such as those from Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. The architecture also supports massively parallel processing on industry-standard hardware, like that offered by HP , so it can scale out to handle data deployments into the hundreds of terabytes. Scalability has helped Vertica score high-end digital marketing and e-commerce customers such as AOL, Twitter, and Groupon. Vertica has proven itself as an innovator. It added inmemory and flash-memory analysis for faster querying. It introduced Hadoop Map14 Feb. 28, 2011
Reduce connectivity to support customers interested in so-called NoSQL analysis of nonstandard data, along with options for low-cost open source storage and data processing. Vertica was also among the first vendors to venture into the cloud, with an option to host Vertica deployments on Amazons EC2 platform. HP says Vertica
recently added workload management features to the database to try to plug that gap, but the product is used almost entirely for analytic data marts. Death Of Neoview HP tried to create its own EDW with the Neoview platform, launched in 2007, but that effort is officially dead.
quisition. HP didnt grant interviews with Robison or other executives involved with its data warehouse strategy. An HP spokesman called Neoview a proprietary data warehouse solution, contrasting it with Verticas scalable and standards-based software aimed at business intelligence. Vertica is absolutely scala-
What Factors Influence Your Data Warehouse Choice?

Total cost of operation 39% Higher data availability 39% Ease of ongoing maintenance 34% Faster development of new databases and applications 34% More complex database requirements supported 28% Higher throughput 27% Larger databases enabled 27%
Data: InformationWeek Analytics 2010 State of Database Technology Survey of 580 business technology professionals at companies with one or more enterprise data warehouses, August 2010
will bolster its efforts to provide private-cloud services. Vertica was already partnering with HP , and many of its more than 300 customers run on HP hardware. The database is compatible with HP servers and storage, and it should be a simple matter to configure optimized analytic appliances on HP hardware. What Vertica is not, though, is an enterprise data warehouse (EDW) capable of supporting thousands of users and mixed query loads simultaneously. At least, it hasnt proved that in realworld deployments. Vertica
HP quietly confirmed just a few weeks ago that its no longer selling Neoview, which was intended to compete with Teradata and highend Oracle and IBM EDWs. The product, initially a pet project of former HP CEO Mark Hurd, died because of its high price, poor differentiation, and corporate neglect. HP says it will work with Neoview customers, of which only a handful remain, on a migration path. Shane Robison, executive VP and chief strategy and technology officer, is the lead HP exec on the Vertica ac-
ble up to hundreds of terabytes, but the vendor has few customers with more than 100 users, according to Gartners latest Magic Quadrant report. Neoview customersincluding HP , which based its own data warehouse strategy on itcould have tens of thousands of concurrent users, which they would be hard pressed to handle on Vertica, particularly for a variety of query loads. Looking at the Neoview and Vertica products, HP effectively abandoned one end of the market and embraced another. The opportunity
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Vertica presents is far more mainstream: More than 90% of data warehouses contain less than 10 TB of data, by most estimates. Thats a market where Neoview never made sense. Vertica not only makes sense for these smaller deployments, but it can also scale out in massively parallel processing deployments. Given HPs failure with Neoview, one would hope HP will retain Verticas management teambased in Massachusettsand give it autonomy. EMC and IBM have done just that with their respective Greenplum and Netezza acquisitions, and by most accounts those units havent suffered a postacquisition hangover. Will HP take the same approach? Too soon to say, says an HP spokesman by email. Our intention is to acquire an operational business, and we expect that we will need Vertica employees to continue their current functions to maintain this business. What About Partners? The big complication is Verticas impact on HPs partnerships with Microsoft and SAP. Microsoft and HP recently announced a series of appliances for data warehousing, analytics, and messaging. Theyre designed to speed up and lower the cost of deployments by presenting everything needed in a prepackaged, pretuned appliance. HPs spokesman calls that partnership complementary to HP-Vertica, but its hard to see how, with the possible exception of the Exchange appliance. Its not as clear cut as Microsoft products being focused on pure Microsoft shops. Microsoft has much broader ambitions with its SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse. Ive talked with plenty of customers who have considered both column-store and row-store databases for the same application. AOL and Provisio, for example, both considered column-store and row-store, and Provisio replaced a Microsoft SQL Server deployment with ParAccel, a column-store that competes with Vertica. HPs alliance with SAP, meantime, would seem to be unshakable, but it cant be sitting well in Walldorf that HP is buying the archrival of Sybase IQ. Vertica has been going after Sybase customers and openly criticizing Sybase IQ for years. One slam Vertica has used in recent years has been to site Sybase IQs lack of support for massively parallel processing (MPP). But that recently changed when Sybase added an MPP option. Sybase, like Vertica, has also been working on supporting faster data loading, mixed query workloads, and larger numbers of users. Sybases progress toward handing EDW deployments earned specific mention in Gartners recent Magic Quadrant report on data warehousing vendors. Infobright is another vendor working on the drawback of column-store databasesslow loading speeds with a new distributed load processor to speed loading to 1 TB per hour. Fast loading is essential for near-real-time analysis; Vertica addressed it in 2009 with its FlexStore feature. Bottom line: The loyalties of HP customers, not to mention HP salespeople, are likely to be torn. Historically, customers choose the database first and the hardware second, but appliances are blurring those lines. Make no mistake, there will be deals in which HP, Microsoft, and Sybase will compete for the same data warehousing and analytics customers. As for HPs broader data warehousing ambitions, the company offered only a broad statement about continued investment in enterprise information optimization. HPs acquisition of Vertica is a positive step, but its only a half step back into data warehousing. To compete with the likes of IBM, Oracle, and Teradata, HP must provide a product for applications with lots of users and mixed query loadsthe top end of the EDW market it gave up on when it killed Neoview. And beyond databases and appliances, HP must also address the gaping holes in its data integration, data quality, BI, and analytics portfolios. For that, well have to wait for yet more acquisitions.
Doug Henschen (dhenschen@techweb.com)
informationweek.com
16 Feb. 28, 2011
By Chris Murphy
Is your shop the place where great business ideas grind to a halt? Heres how to speed things up.
Really listen to CIOs these days, and
youll hear something in their voices: impatience. Its not always overt. And its more than the anxious ambition of most successful executives, who got where they are in part by pushing and pushing to get things done. This impatience runs deeper. They look at the speed with which IT delivers business value, and they have a nagging sense that its not close to good enough. This isnt about the speeds and feeds of technical performance, of gigahertz this and gigabit that. Thats ITs comfort zone, and in that arena, CIOs, their organizations, and their vendors have exceeded every rational expectation. In fact, that exceptional technical performance has raised expectations that IT organizations themselves can and must execute faster. This need for speed is about shortening the distance between great idea and end result. Its the time and effort and cost between Hey, what if we and employees using a new productivity tool or customers crowing about the latest tech-based innovation. This need for speed comes to a head when the
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sales and marketing and product development and HR groups say they can be ready to go in two monthsand IT says six. Too often, CIOs are reaching this painful conclusion: IT is just too darn slow. Listen to Rob Carter at FedEx. A CIO couldnt work for a more enlightened company when it comes to understanding ITs central role in business success. Carter earned his seat at the table long ago. When huge strategic decisions get made at FedEx, Carter and his IT organization are there from the start. Still, the reason Carters driving a sweeping change to how FedEx runs its data centers and manages applications is in large part because, when the discussion turns to when a business initiative can be completed, all eyes turn to IT. Its nice to be seen as strategic, Carter says, but its also difficult to be the long pole in the tent every time we want to go do something. Listen to Randy Mott, CIO of Hewlett-Packard. Mott has cut the time it takes to complete the typical HP IT project down to six months, but now he thinks he needs to slash it again, to three
Feb. 28, 2011 19
[COVER STORY] TOO DARN SLOW
months. Instead of big-bang IT, he wants ITs impact to be constant. We ought to be changing the productivity of everybody in our organization every 30 daysin HP, not IT, Mott says. If were going to keep up with the growth in front of us, we better figure out how to do that. Listen to Denis Edwards, CIO of global staffing company Manpower. Edwards sees Amazon Web Services spinning up a server in minutes for a developer and sees Apple and its legions putting out new iPhone apps every single day, and he knows thats the standard by which IT will be judged. So hes making Manpowers enterprise software development and distribution model more like an app store, where country managers can have local IT teams grab software tools, such as a new video interviewing app thats in development, and implement them without it becoming a long-term project. Listen to Michael Heim, CIO of Eli Lilly. The drugmaker is using Amazon cloud infrastructure to let scientists do early-stage, compute-intensive research. Nothing is more important to this business than discovering new drugs, yet in the past it could take six to eight weeks just to get IT services set up for those researchers. Now it takes days. Its hard to underestimate the value of letting scientists work at their own pace, Heim says. Listen to Chris Perretta, executive VP and CIO of financial services company State Street, which is building a private cloud environment in order to, yes, cut maintenance costs, but more important, to accelerate application development, the core of State Streets IT-led competitive advantage. Our goal is to optimize the time from idea to solution, Perretta says. The idea is when the stopwatch starts. Really, its about the customerwhen does their stopwatch start, not mine. Listen to FBI CIO Chad Fulgham, who took control of the intelligence
20 Feb. 28, 2011
agencys biggest, most important IT projecta twice-delayed case management system called Sentinelfrom contractor Lockheed Martin in order to pull it across the finish line. Fulgham, who learned about speed working on Wall Street, has FBI IT staffers employ-
HPs Randy Mott wants 90-day IT projects: If were going to keep up with the growth, we better figure out how to do that.
ing agile development to break the $451 million project into smaller pieces and make adjustments on the fly. The smaller team takes out a lot of the, for lack of a better word, bureaucracy, he says. It is a fundamental change in how the federal government does IT. I want to be on the leading edge. Why Now Why is this need for IT speed accelerating? First, technology and process advances, from cloud computing and virtualization to Web services and agile development, are making it possible for IT pros to deliver applications and infrastructure much faster. Amazon, for instance, showed its possible to deliver compute and stor-
age infrastructure in minutes, not months, and Salesforce.com slashed the time it can take to launch CRM applications. Yes, there are caveats galore. Can Amazon meet your security requirements and enterprise-class service-level agreements? Can Salesforce integrate the way you want with other enterprise applications? But these cloud services reset the benchmark when it comes to getting critical IT resources up and running in next to no time. Inside companies own data centers, virtualization has made it feasible for companies to mimic Amazonlike clouds. Theyre building private clouds that allow for faster provisioning of servers and more flexibility in moving workloads across servers and storage to meet changing demand. Second is the juggernaut of consumer IT, particularly mobile devices. The pace of change in consumer techled by Apples iPhone, app store model, and now its iPadis raising the expectations of what people can do at work, and IT must keep up. The third and most important driver is the changing nature of demand for enterprise IT. Its what Carter alluded tobusiness just cant move without IT anymore. IT is embedded in new products and new product development. Consider FedExs sensor product that can relay an alert if a package is opened en route. Consider the video interview clips Manpower will send to clients along with the resums of job candidates. Consider the digital mockups Procter & Gamble uses to show a new shampoo bottle to a focus group. If ITs too slow, business is too slow to innovate. Its that simple. A related factor is that IT is doing a lot fewer long-term process projects, like ERP, and a lot more iterative projects, like new tools for collaboration or customer service or customer-facing Web sites. The Corporate Executive Board has studied this phenomenon and found that these shorterterm projects, which it calls informainformationweek.com
to three months. IT cant set priorities for 10 projects spread over the next two years because, once projects one, two, and three are done, that will change what would have been four, five, and six. Guess could have tried to anticipate every feature it needed on its handheldsor it could get devices out with core functionality and add features as salespeople figured out whats most important. Theres an innovation feedback loop that right now, in these long development cycles, IT constrains, Mott says. OK, so 90-day projects are a nice theory. How will Mott get there? First, its worth noting how HP got down to six-month IT project cycles, since many companies arent even there. One step was to staff each project for faster results. That means having 10 people on a project for six The Innovation Feedback Loop months rather than five people for a Technology doesnt just meet de - year. Mott also measured the number mand; it creates demand. Thats of IT locations involved in any project another reason IT cant live in long, and tried to keep that number low, orderly project cycles. under the theory that proximity helps Guess experience is a great example people work faster. of what HPs Mott calls the innovaIn measuring on-time delivery, Mott tion feedback loop, and its a big rea- weighted projects based on their son hes trying to slash the average valueso four little projects on time time it takes to complete an IT project and one huge one late doesnt equal
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tion projects, now account for 45% of ITs new project budgets. With these kinds of projects, business units dont know exactly what they want at the start. IT needs to move with the business units to get something in front of customers or employees, listen, and then iterate, either by fixing whats wrong or adding more features. Last holiday season, Guess CIO Michael Relich gave the clothing retailers salespeople iPod Touches equipped with bar-code readers so they could tally customers' purchases on the store floor. As soon as the salespeople got those devices, they flooded Relich with requests to do new things with them: Let me sign customers up for the loyalty program. Let me check inventory at the mall on the other side of town. In such a world, velocity is more important than perfection, says Peter Hinssen, a consultant and author of The New Normal. More and more products are experienced through a digital filter, Hinssen argues. He recounts buying a new car, trying to plug an iPhone into it to play music, and being told his accessory wasnt compatible with the phone. This is the digital world IT must keep up withone where Apple can view a $40,000 car as an accessory to the iPhone. Speed over perfection can be a tough notion for IT to accept. But if IT is go ing to drive business results and maintain its strategic presence, it cant slow the business down. Warns Hinssen: If you dont like change, youll probably like irrelevance even less.
Manpowers Edwards is building an internal app store: We can get things done faster and get more things done in parallel.
80% on-time delivery. Also, he used what he calls time-phase boxing, comparing projects of similar length to see if theyre hitting milestones on time, in order to spot delays sooner. So if the average three-month project moves into testing phase at six weeks, and project XYZ still isnt testing by week seven, the time-phase boxing metric would be flashing red. HP will keep leaning on these practices. To squeeze IT projects down to 90 days, Mott is putting a lot of faith in automating more of his organizations testing scripts, because too much time is spent just making sure everything still works right. (HP sells testing automation, via its Mercury acquisition.) Mott also wants developers using fewer tools and languages, rather than letting them pick whichever ones they like best. Having more people trained on a smaller set of skills will let HP move people across projects more freely. Well have multiple skills, he says, but we cant have 500 skills. IT also needs to understand which elements of speed matter most to their companies. Consider Eli Lilly using Amazons infrastructure service for drug research. The discovery of a single new drugand getting that drug through the entire research, development, and regulatory pipeline soonercan change the future of the company. For us, its pipeline, pipeline, pipeline, said Heim, explaining the companys cloud strategy at last Septembers InformationWeek 500 Conference. Anything we can do to further our knowledge, get products into the pipeline, and develop those more quickly is crucial to us. Thats why Lilly saw big value in trying Amazons infrastructure as a service to speed the earliest stages of drug discovery, when a researcher might want to quickly model and test an idea. (The fact that early-stage research often involves relatively nonsensitive data thats not much of a security risk also played a part in Lilly
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moving those resources to the cloud.) Perhaps no industrys IT organizations are feelingor should be feelingthis speed pressure more acutely than those in the U.S. healthcare sector. If healthcare providers are going to cash in on federal subsidies for deploying electronic health records, the clock is tickingnot to just get them implemented, but to make sure doctors, nurses, and other clinicians apply them in specific ways that meet federal meaningful use guidelines. Oh, and theyll also be looking for ways to make patients healthier and lower the costs of treating them in the process. IT needs to judge itself on whether its fast enough at the things that matter most to the companywhether thats integrating new suppliers needed to launch a product or providing the IT resources to design and spec a product. Those are real-world provisioning. Its how fast can you go from zero to a billion in a product, Mott says. Those companies that make the transition and cut down that cycle time will become the leading players in the field.
showcase new applications and prototypes they think all of Manpower could use. From these prototypes, execs will decide which to develop and test. Then those software tools will be put into Manpowers version of an app store, available to country managers to implement when theres a business need in their markets. Inside the expo, theres a kiosk that looks like a very large ATM. It has a touch screen that a person can use to look for job openings, create a Manpower profile, or even access a LinkedIn account, and use that to apply for jobs. Its something of an interactive billboard for Manpower that could be placed in a mall or an airport, or possibly even replace some of the companys low-traffic branch offices. What it really is, though, is a giant iPhone app. Manpower had already developed an iPhone app to make it easy for people to apply for jobs. For that, the big effort was getting the companys Web application to respond to touch-screen commands. Using the smartphone app as a base, it built the ATM-sized prototype in about three months. Learning From Consumer Tech Next is a wall-mounted computer To see the effect of consumer technol- display showing Google Earth, inteogy on corporate IT, theres no better grated with Direct Talent, Manplace than Manpowers headquarters in powers back-end software that Milwaukee on a recent January day. The manages job candidates applicalobby is full of suitcases and foreign tions. So while looking at a Google accents as the company wraps up its Earth map of Europe, a person can global leadership meeting, where exec- zoom in on each country and see utives from around the world get the data on how many new people have Manpower religion. Throughout the recently applied to Manpower in event, the IT organization sets up shop Italy. Whats the point? Thats what IT in a large conference room to show its VP Mark Bistersky asked when latest ideas. From nearly every test proj- IT director Ken Rheingans ect or prototype, this much is clear: suggested they build it. I This IT team is racing to keep up with said that I dont see the consumer technology. business value, but Ken The expo is part of CIO Edwards said, Yeah, but it looks attempt to get more development hap- cool, and it wont cost pening faster, by tapping the com - any money, Bistersky panys smaller IT teams worldwide. In recalls. They built it, conjunction with the leadership meet- and several salespeoing, IT teams from Bulgaria, France, ple loved it, saying Canada, Argentina, and elsewhere they wanted it to
bring some sizzle to sales presentations. Manpower demos a prototype Face book app that lets people friend a virtual recruiter. Its not a real person and doesnt pretend to be; its an app that lets you ask questions using chat, and it responds by providing Manpower Web resources. The results it provides are really no different from the ones you get with Web search, but some people are just more comfortable using Facebook and the chat interface. Fish where the fish are, Bistersky explains. Manpower also shows off an advertising wizard, essentially an analytics tool that assesses and scores the copy in job ads written by recruiters based on the effectiveness of past ads with similar wording. Theres Interview Buddy, a smartphone app
For FBIs Fulgham, agile development is a fundamental change in how the federal government does IT.
that a job candidate can check before heading to an interview. The app provides information about the company and offers simple tips, like asking if your shoes are shined. And theres the app we mentioned earlier, video interviewing, where a recruiter provides a series of questions, a candidate tapes responses, and those answers are shared with relevant hiring managers. The big change here for Manpower is twofold. One is that these ideas are inspired by consumer technology. Whether its building or using smartphone apps or Facebook searches or Google Earth links, the company is determined to keep its enterprise IT as
relevant and powerful as the personal computing experiences of employees, partners, and customers. The other is that all this work is happening in parallel by distributed IT teams. Rather than wait for a central IT team to get around to each of these ideas, Manpowers letting the Canada IT team develop the video interview, for example. Once the app is tested in other markets and deemed good enough to implement worldwide and integrate with all of the companys systems, it will be offered to all country units via the app store. IT needs speed, but it needs the right kind of speed. With Manpowers video interviewing, the demand is overwhelmingall country managers want it as soon as they see it. However, if each country unit went out and found its own video interviewing software and ran with it before it was tested and stabilized, Manpower would end up with a fragmented candidate pool, with some video in one format inaccessible to people in another. Edwards manages to look both energized and exhausted, hugging a Diet Coke as the IT expo wraps up on Friday afternoon and delegates stream out of the lobby to head back to their home countries. He knows what he has done. He has revved up demand. And now his team needs to pick the right apps; deliver technology thats secure, works globally, and integrates with other company systems; and deliver it before the excitement withers away. If video interviewing is still in the prototype
room next year, the feedback to Manpowers IT team will be, Didnt you promise us this last year? When will we finally have it? 100 MPHThe Wrong Way? Once IT decides to focus on speed, two obstacles get in the way: security and governance. Securitys often the trump card IT plays. Its certainly true that security and regulatory compliance make business IT more complicated than consumer IT, but security cant be the overriding excuse for not moving faster. CISOs must bring more of a business point of view to their security judgments, says James Dipasupil, a consultant and former CISO of financial services company Ameriprise and health insurer WellPoint. Having worked in financial services and healthcare, Dipasupil knows some risks are nonnegotiable. Youll never risk breaking a regulation or knowingly put a Web app out with a cross-site scripting error. But for some security problems, CISOs must weigh a delay against the risk and decide if the app can be rolled out and any problems resolved along the way. Again, its velocity over perfection and its heresy to some security pros. CISOs need to get comfortable with that, Dipasupil says. CISOs also need to get comfortable automating more security testing, he says. (Dipasupil does some consulting work with a security automation firm, Veracode.) Skilled security staff will always be in too short supply to hand test every element. Reserve these really good security people for the really dif-
FedEx long ago made IT a strategic asset. Now CIO Carter is transforming its IT infrastructure for greater speed and flexibility with an architecture for general purpose computing.
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ficult security problems, Dipasupil says. Another time saver: Have legal, compliance, and IT agree on key elements of a law or regulation. Too often, the interpretation of a law or regulation gets debated anew with every security problem. Then theres IT governance, a term that practically screams red tape. Governance covers a lot of ground: budgeting, priority setting, aligning IT and business sponsors. Done wrong, its a lightning rod for criticizing IT for being too slow, and a major reason business units start their own rogue Salesforce and other projects without IT input. Project management offices generally dont do a good job of being flexible, says Shvetank Shah, who leads the Corporate Executive Boards IT practice. Too often, the PMOs methodology is built to handle complicated, long-term projects, and that puts too much overhead on small, quick projects. Having flexibility gets more important as companies do more iterative projects, those that have to factor in customer and employee feedback. You want IT to be in constant test-and-learn mode, Shah says, and IT isnt built for that. But IT leaders who try to move faster without sound governance practices can end up going 100 miles an hour in the wrong direction, says George McKinnon, CIO of Chinabased IT outsourcer Bleum and former CIO of Nationwide Insurance and VP of IT at Expedia. To have credibility with business units, CIOs need good data on IT operations, he sayswhich projects are on time, or how speeding up one project will cause others to be slowed down. And IT must be transparent about quality trade-offsdoes everyone agree that this app can go out as good enough and revised on the fly? Getting speed without sufficient quality, you lose trust, McKin non warns. HPs Mott doesnt plan to give an inch on governance, even as he tries to
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State Streets Perretta measures time to when customers see results: When does their stopwatch start, not mine.
slash IT project times. To force business leaders to prioritize IT projects, Mott demands that every one of them gets a cost-benefit analysisno IT effort goes forward without a CBA. If its a one-week project, the CBA isnt that big, Mott says. These things scale together. Yes, the first CBA employees do takes time, as they struggle to define the business outcomes they expect from a project. But with experienced people, a CBA on a small project can take 15 minutes. Its not where most of your time gets spent, he says. Architected For Speed One major area that holds back IT speed is legacy IT infrastructure. FedExs Carter, speaking at a CIO event last fall, told the audience not to spend time looking back at how they got where they areeveryone has some mix of legacy software, hardware, and architecture. In fact, any CIO who doesnt have this dilemma is either way beyond good or has been keeping too tight a rein on IT to let the business grow, he says. The bottom line: CIOs must look ahead and decide if their companies IT architecture can keep up with the pace of business. Carter didnt feel he had that. But before he tried to change it, he wanted
his fellow business leaders to agree. So his team did some research, identifying the thousands of applications, servers, and custom interfaces that stitched together the many businesses FedEx had acquired and built over the years. Carter made the business case that FedEx couldnt do all the things it wanted to doprovide a unified customer experience, launch new products rapidly, make and quickly integrate acquisitionswithout a more unified IT infrastructure. FedEx is overhauling its infrastructure using a services-based approach. The apps will remain but will call on common data sources for 24 core transportation-related services, tasks like providing an address. The apps are also being rewritten to use common infrastructure such as databases and messaging, so they can move across servers. FedEx built two data centers based on highly virtualized, x86 environmentsa private cloud for what Carter calls general purpose computing, letting application workloads be shifted more efficiently to any part of the data center. No apps get into those new data centers until they run on this modern services architecture. Manpowers Edwards also revamped the companys architecture for speed. Edwards decided not to consolidate the company onto a single ERP platform near term. That remains a longterm goal; today, high-impact apps such as video interviewing and tabletbased apps for recruiters are the more urgent priority. However, Edwards did need to establish a company-wide integration architecture for the app store concept to work, so a new application could be plugged into any number of legacy Manpower systems used worldwide. In the past, Manpower would build a unique, one-to-one interface to connect each countrys legacy system to any new app. Now, Manpowers using a services architecture, where apps publish data in common XML formats, so local IT teams can more
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easily integrate them to their legacy systems. The speed comes from teams around the world working on small projects in parallel. Were doing a ton of proofs of concepts and pilots, and we can do that because we understand what we want our architecure to look like, Edwards says. A year ago, he wouldnt have been comfortable allowing all this distributed development, because the architecture wasn't ready. We have to make sure our impatience doesnt lead us to make mistakes that cause problems down the road, he says. From Agile To Open Source While cloud computings the trendiest tool for IT speed, many IT pros will point to some long-standing practices as the best way to pick up the pace. Agile development tops the list. Agiles had passionate advocates for decades, stipulating quick iterations of development followed by close col laboration with end users to confirm that developers are delivering whats needed. Companies such as UPS and General Motors are adding visualization software to the agile process, letting IT mock up what interfaces and transactions will look like to get business feedback before any codes written. Yet that also points to a limit to agiles ability to speed up IT: Business unit partners must be equally committed to it. IT cant do iterative developmentwhat Shah calls constant test and learn modeif business colleagues arent putting in the time. New converts to agile also tend to bring a certain religious zeal to its use, and Bleums McKinnon warns that some projects are still better in traditional waterfall development, like those with very clear specs such as porting an old Cobol system over to .Net. A shops goal should be development agility, being able to switch among styles. A one-size-fits-all methodol ogy will inhibit speed, he says.
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Using open source software is another long-standing practice with potential to increase speed, since the code can be used in prototypes without a lot of vendor negotiations. Manpower is using open software for one proof-of-concept project, knowing it might go to something else later. But open source lets it get started at low cost and maximum flexibility. Outsourcing, as always, is a flashpoint in the debate over speed. Some will turn to outsourcing to get the variable capacity or skills they need to move faster. Others will avoid outsourcing, believing speed comes from inhouse IT pros who know the business and can iterate relevant software more upcoming events:
60% of COOs agreed that building flexible and efficient IT systems to expand ties inside and outside the company is more important after the economic downturn; yet only 7% said that building those flexible systems is driving operating model decisions. And money isnt the problem: 95% said they have enough capital to execute their global strategy. Perretta, State Streets CIO, thinks IT leaders are getting what they ask for. He notes that at most companies, the IT architecture group reports to the CTO, whose main charge is to optimize infrastructure costs. At State Street, chief architect Kevin Sullivans team reports to Perretta, and its man-
Meet Your CIO Peers
Discuss The Need For Speed at this years InformationWeek 500 Conference Executives from leading global companies will gather to discuss how theyre turbocharging business execution and growthaccelerating new products, driving revenue, leveraging analytics, tapping social networks, while also managing the risk. Find out more at: informationweek.com/conference Sept. 11-13 at St. Regis Monarch Beach, Calif. quickly. None of these methods, from private clouds to agile development to outsourcing, guarantees speed. Compa nies need more than tools: They need an IT strategy that emphasizes speed. Meet The Need IT hasnt been slow for a lack of effort. Speedin terms of delivering end results to customerssimply hasnt been central to the IT mission. Over the last decade, cost cutting has been more likely to dominate the agenda, both in terms of cutting how much IT spends and in using IT to squeeze costs out of business operations. That tendency has left a huge strategic mismatch in companies. In a survey last year of chief operating officers at electronics and high-tech companies worldwide, Accenture found that date is to collapse the time it takes for the company to deliver IT-based business results. The demand for IT is unquestionably there. The reason ITs under the gun is because business leaders know they cant get anywhere without IT. Listen again to those COOs in the Accenture survey. Seventy percent said IT is critical to global expansion, though only 21% think their corporate IT systems are capable of supporting it. This gap explains why CIOs are so impatient. IT is seen as too slow precisely because the business demand is so intense. IT needs to step up to that challenge. With John Foley, Doug
Henschen, and Rob Preston Write to Chris Murphy at cjmurphy@techweb.com
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The iPhones Table Trouble

Lots of data + small screen = big problem By Tom Thompson
ne of the great challenges developers of business apps for mobile handsets face is the presentation of tabular data in an area only slightly larger than a business card. Presenting sufficient data at a size thats readable is difficult. Flub this up and no one will use the app, regardless of how good its other properties are. Most business applications tend to show one or more rows of data items, be they stock prices, status reports, time sheet entries, inventory levels, or the like. So the use of tables is a pervasive need for mobile business applications, and developers using iOS as well as other mobile environments must master the details of presenting rows of data in an attractive, usable format. Fortunately, Cocoa Touchthe object-oriented framework used in programming for Apple devices such as the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad provides classes that display data in a compact, tabular format. UITableView, for instance, arranges data into a hierarchic structure of lists, with each one presented as a table on the screen. Other supporting classes and methods help users navigate easily through these tables, letting them quickly drill down through a complex data set to the desired information. UITableView is good at managing and displaying information and often
serves as the workhorse in data-centric applications. But information on using UITableView is scattered throughout volumes of documentation in the Apple iOS software development kit. To simplify things, Ive consolidated this information in this introduction to UITableView and its related classes. Terminology And Style In the abstract, table data is presented as rows of content that can be formatted in a specific style. Exactly what constitutes a row and a column,
points to specify a rows height. Because a row spans the width of the screen, a table displays only one column of information. Rows of related content can be grouped into sections. Sections have distinctive header strips that appear at the top of each group and include a title. An optional footer can appear below each group and also has a title. Titles can consist of strings or graphics. As with rows, you can specify the height of headers and footers. The entire table can also have its own optional header and footer.
A Matter Of Style
iOS tables can be either plain or grouped
Plain Style
Current temperature and setpoints Indoor temperature Section Outdoor temperature Heating setpoint Cooling setpoint 69 51 51 74 Header Row Row Row Footer Interval
Group Style
Update interval settings Periodic updates
OFF
Section
30 sec 1 min
5 min
Use these settings to have the app poll the system and determine how often the poll occurs
though, is a looser concept on mobile devices than it is on the desktop. An iOS table row is a horizontal strip of content drawn across the width of the screen. The content of a row can be a mix of text and graphics, and you use
iOS tables come in two styles: plain and grouped. For the plain style, a table consists of section headers, followed by rows of content displayed as lists. For the grouped style, the sections occupy distinct screen regions,
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[DR. DOBBS REPORT ] MOBILE DEVELOPMENT
with the header and footer content appearing above and below them (see figure, p. 31). When you first create a table, you specify its style, either directly in the code or in Interface Builder. Once set, a tables style cant be changed. Table rows, which are also called cells, have four predefined styles: default, style1, style2, and subtitle. The styles vary slightly in the number of built-in text fields they offer and whether an optional image is displayed. Different styles can appear in a table, and the style can be changed on the fly. Cells can also be customized to present additional text labels and images, or present controls such as sliders, buttons, and switches. For example, in the figure on p. 31 the grouped table has a
cell with a switch and another that has a segment control. Table Classes A key class for managing an iOS device screen is the UIView. Its responsible for painting content on the screen and capturing user events (typically touches). For more on how to use the UIView class, see The iPhone Isnt Easy, infor mationweek.com/1292/ddj/noteasy. I mention the UIView class here because UITableView and UITableViewCell are subclasses of it. Therefore, they inherit the ability to display content and respond to touch events. However, these classes dont store data. They only display it and let users interact with the apps data repository, also known as the apps data model. UITableView is responsible for im-
plementing a tables layout and certain behaviors. It uses cell objects to organize and display the data. It also is scrollable like UIScrollView, but only vertically. The UITableViewCell class is responsible for displaying a row and its content. This class serves as a template that clones as many instances of a cell as is required to make up a section. In this sense, UITableViewCell functions similarly to a Java factory method. Each cell can have a different style and displays the information that it references in the data model. As mentioned earlier, a cell can display text, images, and controls. Cells are complex objects with many built-in views, including several content-specific views, as well as a background view and an accessory view. The accessory view displays con-
trols and optional images that assist in navigating to another screen. Table Protocols In iOS parlance, a table protocol defines method declarations and the desired responses when these methods
are invoked. Its up to the developer to assign a delegate object that implements the protocol. An Objective-C protocol therefore functions like a Java interface. The iOS runtime is made aware that a class is a delegate object by the addition of a suitable
protocol declaration in the class header file. Tables use two protocols: UITableViewDataSource_Protocol and UI TableViewDelegate_Protocol. The UITableViewDataSource_Protocol gets information for UITableView about table layout and how to supply data to it for display. For table layout, this protocol defines two required methods. The first method, numberOfRowsInSection, queries the app about the number of rows a section has. The second, cellForRowAtIndexPath, retrieves a specific cell in the table so that it can be matched up to its data source and the data displayed. The UITableViewDelegate_Protocol describes how the table behaves and its appearance. This protocol is used to customize the appearance of headers and footers, modify a cells height, and specify a background color or image. All methods in this protocol are optional. A UITableViewController class is a variant of the UIViewController class, which is designed to manage a table. It packages housekeeping functions, the stub routines for the data source, and delegate protocol methods into one convenient view controller class. This design allows the tables event handling, data display, data updates, and custom behavior to be contained in one omnibus object. UITableViewController also performs duties such as loading the tables data, flashing the scroll indicators, and clearing the selection choice. It provides access to the table views elements and properties. A final class, NSIndexPath, has little to do with tables but is crucial to their operation. It describes a path to a node in a tree of arrays. Recall that tables are organized as a hierarchy of lists, where each list corresponds to an array. An instance of NSIndexPath provides the section and row information that references a specific cell and can be used to also reference its data. Many table view methods described
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here use NSIndexPath instances as arguments, or they return results as an NSIndexPath. For more information on each class, consult the iOS software development kit documentation. Design Trade-Off When writing code, the first decision is whether to use a UIViewController to manage the instance of UITableView, or a UITableViewController. The UIViewController choice gives you fine-grained control over every aspect of the tables appearance and operation. However, that control comes at a price: You have to manage every detail of the tables operation, such as assign ing and implementing the protocol delegate objects. In contrast, UITableViewController manages a lot of details for you by assigning itself as the delegate object for both protocols. It also provides some housekeeping routines. The trade-off is that some flexibility in table design is lost because this class implements certain default behaviors. Ive used UITableViewControllers for data display and in many cases was able to customize a tables appearance without too much effort. Unless you require an extremely customized user interface, Id recommend starting with a UITableViewController. The source code for how to do thisas well as additional information, including screen shots of the table functionscan be found at informationweek.com/1292/ ddj/table. These examples only scratch the surface of whats possible with iOS tables. You can edit and tinker with them. Try changing a cells style, for example. Or with Interface Builder, change the tables property from plain to grouped and see what happens. Experimenting is the best way to expand your knowledge of how iOS table design is done.
Tom Thompson is head of Proactive Support for embedded products at Freescale Semiconductor. The views dont represent Freescales positions, strategies, or opinions. Write to us at iwletters@techweb.com.
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Agile At 10: Evolving Again Its principles have become part of how developers approach their work informationweek.com/1292/ddj/agile Parallel Merge Algorithm improvement through performance measurement informationweek.com/1292/ddj/parallel The Rise And Fall Of Languages In 2010 Python and Objective-C surge, and VB falls off a cliff informationweek.com/1292/ddj/language
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[IPV6]
Now For The Next-Gen Net

IPv4 is on its way out, IPv6 is in, and dawdling will cost you By Jeff Doyle
oes this remind you of Y2K? The hard reality that the Internet is running out of IPv4 addresses recently hit the Wall Street Journal and New York Times. You know what comes next: business executives get to wondering just how this IPv6 thing will impact their businesses. When the CEO asks about your plan, will you have a good answer? Youd better, because the companies that provide your customers with Internet access are on the move. Broadband service providerscable, DSL, and mobile depend on a steady flow of new IP addresses as they grow, and they are actively implementing IPv6. Because of these initiatives, a tremendous number of IPv6equipped end users will be coming online over the next few years. While top content providers, including Facebook, Google, and Yahoo, are adding IPv6 capabilities to their sites to ensure their services will be available to both IPv6 and IPv4 users, broadband providers understand that, for the foreseeable future, most Internet content will remain IPv4. The dilemma, then, is that they have only IPv6 addresses for their new customers but must ensure that those customers can still reach IPv4 content. The methods they use to solve this problem can affect your business in some surprising ways. One solution is for providers to de-
ploy centralized network address translators (NATs, either NAT444 or DS-Lite) that allow ISPs to dual-stack new customers with a public IPv6 address and a private IPv4 address. The other option is to use a protocol translator (NAT64) that allows an IPv6-only device to talk to an IPv4-only device. Neither method is idealboth are known to break some applications, such as VoIP, Universal
because a broadband provider serving its customers is using one of these transitional technologies. The customer doesnt understand the nature of the networks hes using; he only understands that a site he wants to access is not working correctly. Sure, it may be the service providers fault, but you can bet hell blame the one running the Web siteyep, that means you. Potential damage to the user experience is the main reason for beginning an IPv6 deployment plan. 4 Steps To Take Now Once you get the go-ahead to begin transitioning to IPv6: 1. Appoint a team. In all but the smallest companies, planning for IPv6 is a cross-discipline effort. This is particularly true when there are multiple groups within your company that will be affected by the IPv6 project. For example, customer online account management, e-mail and Web sites, core network architecture, network security, and network management likely fall under different managers, but all have roles. Plus, an integrated team reduces the risk of the project being derailed by any one group or individuala liability that, in our experience, has complicated many an IPv6 project. 2. Create a business case. Executives naturally want to know what theyre spending money on and will want to understand your IPv6 projects return on investment. Theyll want to
Plug-and-Play, and many online gaming apps. They also can hurt performance and create a single point of failure. Also, applications that identify users by IP address will no longer work if the user is behind a centralized NAT. Because these systems use a pool of public IPv4 addresses rather than public addresses at the individual customer edge, a single public IPv4 address can represent thousands of users. Where a company could run into problems is when its content or Web applications no longer work correctly
Get our full report on IPv6 migration free for a limited time: informationweek.com/analytics/ipv6
informationweek.com
Feb 28, 2011 39
[IPV6]
know what services can be built around IPv6, but its really about being able to continue doing what you already do, and to continue adding new customers, wholl have IPv6. The key to selling your project in the boardroom is to emphasize that an IPv6 deployment is an infrastructure problem. Specifically, your network is running out of an essential resource. Imagine that all of the bandwidth you currently have, all of the server capacity you currently have, and all of the routers and switches you currently own are all you can ever get. This is the business case for IPv6. 3. Include IPv6 in all purchasing decisions. IPv6 shouldnt be considered a special feature or an add-on to any network or end user device, application, or operating system you purchase. Its as essential to IP capability as IPv4, and any vendor that doesnt support IPv6 on par with IPv4 shouldnt be considered in your purchasing decisions. Period. Sounds straightforward, but including a simple IPv6-capable check box on a requirements list isnt enough. Each system in your network has specific protocol, performance, scaling, and security quirks. Some might require support of DHCPv6, or VRRPv6, or DNS AAAA (IPv6) Records, or certain IPv6 routing protocols. Others may not. Some might need to filter on specific details of IPv6 packet headers, and others wont. Some systems might need to process IPv6 packets in hardware. You get the point. This is where your IPv6 team structure, reaching into every corner of your network, is invaluable. A detailed, system-specific list of IPv6 requirements not only reduces project risks, its appreciated by most vendors. The more they understand your needs, the better they can recommend the right product or, in some cases, refine their development road maps. 4. Create a detailed deployment plan. Good planning is all about reducing cost and limiting risk. An
40 Feb 28, 2011
IPv6 Musts
1. Focus on IP address design and management. Start the IPv6 prefix assignment application process now. Stop worrying about conserving addresses and start thinking about adding meaning to individual hex digits. And ditch the spreadsheet to track all this.
2. Update network support systems.

Do you have an internal DNS infrastructure? Can nameservers support both IPv4 A and IPv6 AAAA records? If theyre dual stacked, how do they respond to a name query when there are both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses assigned?
3. Budget for security updates and expertise. End-to-end IPsec notwithstanding, security systems tend to be the problem children in IPv6 deployments. Not everything will survive the transition, so allocate some funds here.
4. Understand the lingo. Tools for

monitoring, logging, alarms, configuration management, and change management have to understand IPv6, not speak it.
5. Have end-to-end training. Dont

limit IPv6 education to IT. Going all-IPv6 positions your company as a technology leader. Make sure customer-facing personnel can tell the story.
result of stalling until IPv4 address depletion limits your options. >> Evaluation and selection of bestfit IPv6 technologies. A large toolbox of IPv6 deployment technologies is available to you. There is simple dual stacking, which makes interfaces bilingual, so that systems can respond to incoming packets of either IP version and originate packets of either version based on DNS responses. There are statically configured tunnels to a wide variety of automatic tunnels to full protocol translators. And theres a lot in between. Understanding the capabilities, applications, and limitations of the available technologies ensures that youre selecting the best options. >> Testing. Trial runs are important with any new technology deployment, and that goes double for IPv6. Although IPv6 has been around for some time, its exposure in production networks is still limited. Because of this, consider the IPv6 code in systems immature until proven otherwise. Predeployment testing for standards compliance and system interoperability reduces the number of surprises youll encounter. Brave New World Theres no going back to IPv4and thats a good thing, because IPv6 will enable growth. Planning for IPv6 now doesnt necessarily mean deploying it now. It means you have a clear perspective on the future of your network, and your business. We predict that most companies have about a year before push comes to shove; exceptions are federal government agencies, federal contractors, and multinationals. Our full report, at information week.com/analytics/ipv6, includes sample case studies for these orgs, as well as a healthcare provider. So dont just sit therestart assembling your team.
Jeff Doyle is a consultant specializing in routing protocols, IPv6, MPLS, and networking best practices. Write to us at iwletters@techweb.com.
informationweek.com
analysis of the impacts of IPv4 address depletion on your ability to conduct Internet business, and the scope of an IPv6 deployment, prevents both the risks inherent in waiting too long and having to deploy in panic mode and the high costs from moving sooner than you need to. Important elements in your deployment plan include: >> Knowledge of who your users and customers are. What content, services and applications do you make available to them? What is your forecast business growth over the next five years, and what parts of your network must support that growth? >> Realistic project timelines. Most of the present challenges associated with IPv6 deployments are the direct
practicalAnalysis
ART WIT TMANN
Salary Survey Preview:What Matters Most To IT Pros
E
Job priorities are changing, but theres a lot more going on here than just the economic hangover
ach year when the results of the InformationWeek salary survey come in, the first set of responses I look at is to this question: What matters most to you about your job? This bellwether question measures the mood of IT pros in an important way, particularly when the data is examined over time. The question offers 24 job factors, ranging from the challenge and responsibility of the job to base pay, vacation time, and commute distance. Our full InformationWeek Analytics report, which will be available in about six weeks, will include responses for managers and staffers for the past three years. For this column, I looked back five years to see just how long-lived some of the salary survey trends are, and the results are astounding. There has been a steady evolution in how IT pros think about their jobs. Here Ill discuss just the data for managers. Between 2008 and 2009, job satisfaction dropped sharply. Those IT managers who said they were very satisfied declined from 26% to 20%. The very satisfied numbers have flattened since then, coming in at 18% this year. So the other trends reviewed here are an indication of why IT pros are less satisfied with their jobs. In 2007, the most important factors to IT pros were job challenge, at 65%; base pay, 51%; and ability to work on innovative IT solutions, 40%. This year, job challenge is still No. 1, but cited by only 45% of survey respondents. Tied for the most important job consideration is my opinion is valued, up from 33% in 2007, while base pay is close behind, at 44%. What about that desire to work on innovative IT projects? It dropped down the list 11 slots, to 14th, with just 24% of respondents this year citing it as very important. A look at which job considerations lost ground over the past five years reveals a decline in what historically have been primary
motivators: job challenge, working on innovative projects, base pay, and benefits. Rising most in importance were factors that individuals have less control over: company stability, job stability, recognition for work well done, and knowing ones opinions are valued. Clearly, some of the shifts evident in these statistics have to do with the economy. In 2007, the economy grew 2% to 3%, then the bottom dropped out in 2008, as the economy shrank at a 4% annual rate in the third quarter and almost 8% in the fourth. Its not hard to imagine that, as IT pros made it through layoff rounds and watched their employers financial statements head into the red, theyd worry more about job and company stability. And when you worry about things you cant affect very much, your job satisfaction suffers. But theres more going on here than the economic hangover. There are enough variables in our What matters most question that increases in one categorylike the desire for job stabilitydont necessarily imply a drop in anotherlike the waning importance of working on innovative projects. My educated guess is that IT pros are at the end of their patience with the do more with less mentality so prevalent at the highest levels of management. They now value vacation time and working with talented peers more than they do working on the latest cool project designed to eliminate a fraction of their peers. Smart companies will internalize these trends and rediscover the importance of their IT teams. If top management thinks ITs attitude stinks, theyre reaping what theyve sown. Art Wittmann is director of InformationWeek Analytics, a portfolio of decision-support tools and analyst reports. More than 100 major reports will be released this year. Sign up or upgrade your membership at analytics.informationweek.com/upgrade.
informationweek.com
46 Feb. 28, 2011
down to Business
ROB PRESTON
mid a recovering economy, technology merger and acquisition activity took off in 2010, as the number of deals and total deal value hit their highest levels since 2007, according to a detailed analysis released this month by Ernst & Young. The mobile, social, cloud computing, storage, security, and analytics segments drove much of that activity, along with healthcare and clean energy. A sign of the times: Companies whose core business isnt technology accounted for 15% of tech acquisition value in 2010, up from 8% in 2009, according to Ernst & Young. In the fourth quarter, for instance, the two largest health IT deals were pharmacy benefits manager Medcos $730 million acquisition of United BioSource, a developer of Web and voice response systems, and insurer Aetnas $500 million purchase of Medicity, a maker of health information exchange technology. In fact, the distinction between tech and non-tech companies is starting to become artificial. Visa plunked down $1.83 billion for CyberSource, a payment management software company, in the 10th largest tech acquisition of the year. Is Visa a financial services company heavily dependent on technology, or is it a technology company that delivers financial services? Regardless of the semantics, expect this trend to accelerate in 2011. The number of technology M&A deals rose 41% in 2010 compared with the year earlier, to 2,658, the largest number since the 3,345 deals done in 2007, Ernst & Young says. The total value of tech deals in 2010 increased 26% year over year, to $119 billion, though the average value per deal, $131 million, was down 10%owing to more but smaller deals overall. Private equity firms accounted for $19.7 billion of that $119 billion in total deal value, more than double the $9.8 billion PE firms spent on tech acquisitions in 2009. Twenty-six technology M&A deals topped
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The New Reality Of Tech Industry Consolidation
New companies including ones from outside techare getting into the tech M&A mix as the modest recovery inspires accelerated deal-making
the $1 billion mark. Among the biggest were Intels $7.29 billion deal for McAfee (security), SAPs $5.65 acquisition of Sybase (analytics, mobile integration), EMCs $2.25 billion acquisition of Isilon Systems (storage), Attachmates $2.14 billion deal for Novell (infrastructure software), and Hewlett-Packards $2.07 billion acquisition of 3Par (storage). Two private equity deals made the top 10: the Advent International and Bain Capital deal for most of RBS Worldpay (a unit of Royal Bank of Scotland) and Carlyle Groups $2.98 billion acquisition of CommScope (carrier infrastructure). Google was the most prodigious acquirer in 2010, disclosing 28 deals in social networking, e-commerce, document sharing, mobile video, payments, and other areas, according to Ernst & Young. The likes of IBM and Cisco have taken a similar tack over the yearsbuying small, innovative companies as de facto R&D arms rather than developing all their own technologies from scratch. The fact that Google is returning co-founder Larry Page to the CEO chairbumping CEO Eric Schmidt up to executive chairman come Aprilis an indication that Google is revving up its internal R&D and innovation engine after years of mostly acquiring companies for that purpose. No doubt the pace of tech industry consolidation will quicken in 2011 as companies with new-found cash expand into new technology, industry, and geographic markets and augment existing ones. Leading the way will be the usual suspectsIBM, Oracle, EMC, Microsoft, Dell, EMC, CA, Cisco, and HP (which just announced its acquiring analytics specialist Vertica). But expect nontraditional players like Google and Facebook, as well as those from outside the industry, to shake things up as well. Rob Preston is VP and editor in chief of InformationWeek. You can write to Rob at rpreston@techweb.com.
informationweek.com
48 Feb. 28, 2011

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Creative destruction visits Cisco 6 | HPs data warehouse muddle 14 | Dr.

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2. Update network support systems.

4. Understand the lingo. Tools for

5. Have end-to-end training. Dont

Salary Survey Preview:What Matters Most To IT Pros

46 Feb. 28, 2011

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