How Green is your PC

The battle to win the hearts and minds of customers entered another round of ‘my dad is bigger than your dad’ style of marketing, as both HP and Dell announced their most recent figures on recycling in the battle to be seen as the most environmentally responsible IT organisation.
This war of marketing, or as I prefer it recycled packaging, began in 2006 when Dell announced a plant a tree for me campaign, and promptly proclaimed itself the environmental warrior of the IT community. The Dell announcement of plant a tree for me said that US$6 per desktop would fund tree planting to cover the carbon emissions the PC would generate over a typical three year life span. I calculated that using an eight hour day and 200 days operational use a year, and providing the PC is switched off when not used in the evening and weekends, then this would equate to approximately 4800 hours of use over the three years. I then used the results from the UK governments Defra report (Defra’s greenhouse gas (GHG) conversion factors for company reporting), which suggests that one should assume an average of 0.43 kg of CO2 emissions per kWh of electrical power consumption, to calculate that a standard 220 Watt PC would emit 454kg of CO2 emissions over the three years, which appears a lot for just US$6 to off set.
This announcement (plant a tree for me) irked HP who have been following a Corporate Social and Environmental Responsible (CSER) agenda, which for many years has embedded Global Citizenship as one of the seven core elements in its corporate objectives. It is also worth noting that HP has been re-cycling products since 1987; it developed the Designed for Environment (DfE) policy in 1992; and entered in to a joint initiative with the World Wildlife Fund US (WWF-US) to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions from its operating facilities worldwide in 2006.
However, the recent announcement from Dell stated it had extended its leadership in global recycling, announcing it is ahead of schedule to achieve a multi-year goal of recovering 125 million kilograms (about 275 million pounds) of computer equipment by 2009.
Not to be out done HP this week announced it recycled nearly 250 million pounds of hardware and print cartridges globally in its fiscal year 2007 – an increase of approximately 50 percent over the previous year and the equivalent of more than double the weight of the Titanic.
Therefore, as we can see this war of words, and deeds, looks set to continue, and as people become more familiar with the concept of a carbon footprint then expect this to become even more personal in how it is improving your life.
I consider that although this posturing appears targeted at convincing the consumer that the vendor has valid ‘green credentials’, and they are not contributing to the problem of green house gases, but are in fact part of the solution, it is at least driving the environmental debate and forcing other vendors to follow, which can not be a bad thing. Particularly as we are likely to witness an increased demand for even small organisations to report on its carbon emissions, and if you consider that in the example above the PC over the three years if it was not switched off at weekends and the evening would generate a total of 2500kg in CO2. Therefore, any approach to raise the awareness must be applauded if it is helping us to reduce our own carbon footprint.

Virtualisation do not chose for today consider tommorow

Good morning, last week of my 3 month research in to IT strategy, so I have been compiling the report, and cannot share any of my findings until the report is published in September. However, today is final read through on 3 sections, then to complete the glossary, then that is it finished. The report captain will have the task of Quality Checking (QC) the whole document, and must spot any inconsistencies.

The rest of week will be working on my presentation for VMworld in September, so if you are going I will see you there.

Virtualisation Market Hots Up

The whole market in virtualisation is dynamic and as such represents a daunting prospect for many CIOs, who must decide which vendor I go with, and what are the gotchas that the technology has hidden.
My advice is to not look beyond a 3-5 year time frame, as the market is changing rapidly, and a leading vendor today may not be then, or the technology will have changed. You do not want to make a 100% life time choice of Betamax, it was the best technology, but VHS won the battle, so beware consider the value you can get, and build in the cost model a complete replacement of the solution in 5 years. Then review the figures and see if they make sense

Vmware changes at the top

Not much to blog about in terms of my day, it has been heads down writing the report, and will be for the next two weeks.

Vmware ditch the Green agenda

Vmware announced this week that they have voted Dianne Green out as CEO and president, to be replaced by an ex Microsoft and EMC SVP. The key question is why and what does this mean for virtualisation and Vmware in particular.
My view is that Dianne, as nice as she was, was destined to be moved out because Vmware have become increasingly isolated in the virtualisation market, or to be exact they are loosing the marketing war on interoperability of virtualisation. I like most others assumed Dianne would be given time to show how Vmware was going to react to the Microsoft Hyper-V entry to the market.
I guess the vote indicates that the board did not believe her approach would address the issue of increased competition in the market. Her replacement, being from EMC, and an ex Microsoft executive, is an interesting choice, and indicates that EMC is taking a more hands-on approach to Vmware than is visible.
I would expect Vmware to start to be more vocal about its partnerships, and begin to build more open links with the likes of Citrix, Microsoft and others. The virtualisation market is still in a state of flux, and just because Vmware is dominant today, does not mean it will be in three years time. To maintain its lead Vmware must re-invent it’s self, and be the champion of interoperability between hypervisors. By doing this, it will increase the potential market size, and therefore increase its share of the revenues.
An area that remains potentially very fertile is that of desktop virtualisation, in this space Vmware has made some strides, but with Citrix having a massive install base of terminal services customers, Vmware must work hard to build on its brand name.
These are I believe interesting times for Vmware, they have every thing to gain, and every thing to lose, so must walk a certain line if they are to remain the face of virtualisation. What now for Dianne, well I would expect her and some colleagues to begin a new start-up in an adjacent market, and try to once again become a dominant figure on wall street.

A Damp day in Hull

It was a 5 am start to the week, but the rain made it feel more like winter, which takes the pleasure away from the 3 hour drive. A day in the office today, so chance to discuss topics with colleagues and generally update each other on what we are doing. It sparks many different conversations on different topics. The one thing you miss working from home.

CTO or CIO who holds the power

The role of IT is changing and it is moving towards a period of transition to a position where IT is embedded in the organisation, and is managed more locally by the people it is designed to help, but still needs the holistic cross departmental perspective. This transition I believe will be the catalyst for the clarification of the roles of CIO and CTO, which is currently not clearly defined (in fact the organisational structure is very haphazard and examples of the CTO reporting to CIO and visa versa are common). We believe that the office of the CTO should include the architecture, strategy, research and development, and planning operations, while the CIO should be responsible for the delivery of IT as a service to their customers as efficiently and effectively as possible, and be focused on the extraction of business value from the IT resources. The CIO will need to have a voice in the office of the CTO so that operational considerations are taken in to account when designing the architecture in the future.

However, given that the two roles are addressing different needs, and therefore have different agendas, we believe that the current arrangement (as haphazard as it is) is not sustainable in the long term; we consider the two roles need to be separated and not be part of the same department: this would enable the forward looking strategic decisions to be made taking all aspects of organisational needs in to account (IT, people, culture, money and market forces), and operational effectiveness be the prime consideration of the CIO, while the CTO is more focused on the technology and the architecture in particular.

Home sweet home

Working on a report, which means that I do not have much new stuff to add to this site: because the work can not be published until the report has been, and that is not until September.

Working on a report is fun; you get to research a topic in depth, build up a detailed knowledge of a topic, and discover what has been happening in the market. The down side is most of this is done from home, and as such you do not get out and meet people, hence not much to say.

The world in a URL

The opening up of the dot name space, so you can have dot anything (up to 64 characters long) will be a nightmare for brand managers: do they protect all the brands, all the tag lines, and all the possible derivations, which could be thousands, or do they just register the brand name.

This is a risky business, as the brand reputation could be high jacked and destroyed on-line, the alternative is managing and funding all the domain names that could be used to link to the brand. Glad I am not a brand manager.

Chaos rules

Last few days have been mad, I am heads down on the report and to be honest getting stuck on some of the more complex models, but drawing pictures helps.

Yesterday was a write off, I had the dentist, doctors for the kids jabs, British Gas doing an inspection, school. And the day was trashed because the nurse got up late, was behind with her work. That small thing made my whole day one of catch-up, and re-assign appointments. The Journalist were OK, and I made the vendor briefing, but I do not want another day like that.

Hyper-v worth the Hype?


I thought the 2nd August was 180 days for when Hyper-v will be released, but I am picking up noises that suggest it is next month, but I may be wrong on that. Hyper-v is a basic hypervisor, and as such lacks some of the more advanced features that Vmware, Citrix (XENserver), VirtualIron, etc have. I believe that the link up with Citrix demonstrates that Microsoft is going after the SMB sector with Hyper-v and leaving XenServer to complete in the enterprise market with VMware, while it works on making Hyper-v as technically capable as its rivals that is.

Vmware with it price bundles is attempting to move into the SMB space, however, what Vmware provides in terms of capability it lacks is a clear understanding of the market, and how to deliver to the SMB sector. Smaller vendors such as VirtualIron and Parallels have created a good reputation in certain SMB markets, but they lack the funding to raise virtualisation profile. Therefore, I believe that as Microsoft winds up its PR message, this can be used by the smaller vendors to ride on the coat-tails and enjoy more success.

Windows server 2008, is a very good product and I think this will become more widely used as the business case evidence is released to support Microsoft's claims of reduced management time and hence cost savings. As for Vista, well 2008 and Vista desktop is an argument from a support perspective, but with talk of Microsoft seven (vista replacement) due in 2009 time frame I think many may hold fire (if they can), which will mean organisations if their refresh is due in 2009, 2010 will have a dilemma use Vista or stay on XP. Evidence is mixed on this, but I believe Vista will more widely adopted in conjunction with 2008, but not in every case.

Only 6 weeks until the football season starts

After last week when it was one day event after another, this week starts in London, but it is home for nearly two months while I complete a report. I will get the odd day out, but at least I will some work done.

Virtualisation aims at the desktop next

The take-away from the Citrix and Vmware analyst events was they have both woken up to the fact that what the analysts have been saying for the past 12 months plus is coming true. Server virtualisation was full of gotcha’s, and end-users found them out and management vendors were not ready. The result was it stalled and damaged confidence.

However, the rise of desktop and application virtualisation is characterised by other vendors being ahead of the game, and the virtualisation vendors being slow to recognise its value. We will have to wait and see how this battle shapes up, as Citrix have a leading position and it is theirs to lose, but their market is based on the old paradigm, not the new. Therefore, I see this as a more level playing field where the best proposition wins out, and so far Citrix has a good story and Vmware some cool technology. What is needed is the mix of both.