IT Ecosystem

The IT industry today consists of a rapidly evolving and massively interconnected network of organizations, technologies, products and consumers. In contrast with the vertically integrated environment of the 1990s and millennium 2000, today’s industry is divided into a large number of domains producing customized components, systems, and services. The degree of interaction between firms in the industry is truly astounding, with substantial number of organizations frequently involved in the design, development, out sourcing, or implementation of even a single module of enterprise software suites.

The IT ecosystem began the 21st century by entering a deep recession, made worse by over investments and business failures in the IT, Software and Telecommunications industries. At around the same time, Microsoft Corporation and the US Department of Justice entered into a Consent Decree (“Consent Decree”) that resolved their multi-year antitrust dispute. Since, this period of retrenchment, the IT ecosystem has regained its health, rebounding from its recession and delivering significant levels of innovation.

This network of organizations can be compared to a biological ecosystem. Like its biological counterparts, the IT ecosystem is characterized by a large number of variables who depend on each other for their mutual effectiveness and survival. Because the performance of individual firms and the utility of individual products depend so much on the performance of other firms and products in the ecosystem, understanding the IT ecosystem requires the development of ways to characterize the collective health of the setting. Drawing from a variety of public and proprietary data, including market value indicators, productivity measurements, and return on invested capital metrics with respect to the three critical indicators of IT ecosystem health, robustness, productivity, and innovation, the IT ecosystem is strong in all three of the most important sectors of Hardware, Software, and Services.

Robustness - can be assessed in a variety of ways. One way is to analyze the sustainability of value in the ecosystem. The persistence or recovery in the value of the constituent firms after a major disruption can be used as an indicator of the ecosystem’s robustness. Another approach to robustness, developed elsewhere, is a measure of financial betas and firm survival rates. A healthy ecosystem will promote the survival of a diverse set of firms, including those that populate a variety of niches, through inevitable disruptions. This diversity provides greater choice and reliability to the customers that depend on a business ecosystem.

Productivity - In conservation literature on biological ecosystems, the term productivity how effectively the ecosystem converts raw materials into living organisms - is a widely used measure of ecosystem health and how it benefits those who use it. Improvements in productivity show that an ecosystem is able to produce more with the same or less input. In the long run, real earnings in a business ecosystem are tied to productivity gains. Improvements in productivity within the IT ecosystem are equally important measures of the health and competitiveness of the IT industry. Output per hour of all persons – or labor productivity – is the most commonly used productivity measure.

Innovation - Robustness and productivity do not completely capture the health of a business ecosystem. Both in ecological and business literature, it is important that systems also exhibit variety or diversity — that they support many different species or types of organizations. Innovation, or Niche Creation, is the critical mechanism by which business ecosystems increase diversity over time. This diversity results in new alternatives and choices for the customers that depend on a business ecosystem. In the analyses of Innovation that follows, we will first look at broad indicators of innovation across the IT ecosystem, and we will then review specific cases of very rapid innovation in products and business models that have resulted in significant growth and changes in the competitive landscape. The return on venture capital is a good measure of the effectiveness of investment in innovation and niche creation. Venture capital is the primary source of funding for start-up activity in new ecosystem domains. Venture capital investment on its own (or the number of new firms created) is not necessarily a good indicator in this context, because we are interested in meaningful, sustainable innovative niches. Return on venture capital investment is a much better indicator of sustainable innovation and niche creation than overall investment levels.

Finally, there is a strong level of innovativeness and growth, with new competitors repeatedly challenging the more established companies. Software and hardware platforms are witnessing significant innovation and evolution, which is in turn fueling innovation in a broad variety of applications and business models.

Shared Business Model

Shared Service Model is collaborative approach to pool in all the resources into one. This approach allows the economies of scale, pooled experience, associative responsiveness, partnerships with in the organization for low cost and high quality. An internal business unit works as a service provider to the business clients that fulfills the non-core businesses and fragments the core business with higher epxertise within the pool of intelligent resources, with other business units of the same organization. Business organizations request products and services within the organization from the one of the business unit so called 'Shared Service Provider'. The various business units are billed interally and their costs are recovered through revenue generation. Since, these clusters of internal business units have to show profitability for their own existence. They normally buffers up some margins in the cost offered to the 'Shared Service Provider', which is a wrong practice. As it reflects the overall cost of the project that can be relatively higher then the actuals. These services are SLA driven and are renegotiated from one client to another. The measurement from internal and external benchmarks ensures that the shared service ogranization is constantly improving.

Also, the bigger organizations have widen their horizons to get into similar partnerships with OEMs to enjoy low cost, expertise, and efficieny in overall execution of the projects. This has certainly benefitted the cusotmers with a quality of service on one hand and lower cost on the other with a structured break up of fat cost that could have come from one business unit earlier.

However, the shared services model has it's own limitations. Unlike outsourcing, for example, which can be used with companies of any size, shared services can live up to its potential only when the parent corporation is above a minimum size. Whether or not shared services makes sense for a particular business application depends on the business, the corporate culture, the applicability of alternative business models, the economic health of the company, the wants and needs of corporate senior management.

Shared Services & Recentralizing

In a recent survey from Forbes, a big question poped up. Is the demand for IT services down or up? Well, the experts have said it right that "demand is still very strong". It's the companies who are cutting down budgets on new assets, hires, software, and hardware. They are trying to meet customer's needs with existing resources. Infact, they are curtailing consultants rather than consultancy. Most of the data is digitized and the volume of transactions are growing like anything. A robust data management infrastructure through data consolidation (green data center) and virtualization have some answers to cut down on cost and might bring a smile on the CIOs face to add some value to the customer's growing needs of humangous transactions.

The transation-volume-revenue, equation has broken down. But, the amount of work involved is growing at it's own pace. In the early years of 2000 the focus was on outsourcing when we were trapped in similar recession then. Now, the focus seems to be shifted in the similar scenario in this recession. Where, CIOs are focusing more on shared services and recentralizing IT.

Citrix's XenConvert Software

Some known problems while using Citrix's XenConvert Software. This section describes known problems for the XenConvert software. Wherever possible, a workaround for the problem has been tried. Converting a Workload with Files in Use

XenConvert cannot copy a file in use by another application or service. To ensure that the file is included in the conversion, stop the respective service before starting the conversion. It is not recommended to convert a workload executing a critical service that keeps critical files open that cannot be stopped (such as a Domain Controller with Active Directory service).Mapped Network Drive Can Interfere with Conversion

If a network drive was mapped to the next available drive letter (e.g. F: when last local drive was E), then XenConvert is unable to get the drive letter for the new VHD that it just created, mounted, and formatted because Windows assigned it to the same drive letter as the network drive. See http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297694/ for a description of the same problem affecting other removable disks. Although that KB pertains to Windows XP, the problem also affects Windows Server 2003 when automount is enabled.

The workaround is to remap the network drive to a drive letter other than the lowest available one before running XenConvert.

Virtualization: An abstract World out there !!

Do you feel like you need to escape the typical hardware and operating system lifecycle “treadmill?” Like a dog trying to catch it's tail..

For Application Virtualization what are the application your organization use and how the users are accessing the Applications? How these users are spread and the related challenges in the WAN environment?

Securing the IT infrastructure in today’s computing environment may well be the biggest challenge faced by organizations. Not only must organizations ensure the integrity of their systems and data, but often they must also prove that their security processes and policies measure up against standards and regulations established and enforced by national standards-developing entities.
In addition, the recent popularization of virtualized environments adds a new layer of complexity to the security picture. Businesses are just beginning to comprehend the security implications of these environments. To tackle these security issues, many organizations adopt a security approach that addresses vulnerabilities through security policy and systems designed to protect the integrity of the IT infrastructure. This approach recognizes that the integrity of the IT infrastructure may be easily compromised by malicious attacks from external sources, but often lacks a means of addressing compromises that originate from within the organization through both intentional and inadvertent employee actions. And ironically, the very systems responsible for providing security—the firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and others—often go unmonitored.

SLA Trap

Whether an organization provides support internally or outsources it, service level agreements are an important base measure of the effectiveness of support. If employees’ technology problems are not being solved—if their laptops aren’t being repaired when they need them or their questions aren’t being adequately answered, for example—they won’t be able to perform their jobs. But SLAs generally are too limited to transactions between the support staff and users. They don’t encourage support staff to see past the immediate technology problem and look for ways that IT can help users do their jobs better.

Furthermore, SLAs are often out of date a few months after they’re established. For instance, in a company that successfully institutes a customer relationship management system, sales and customer service professionals will see their dependence on technology increase rapidly. Salespeople who become dependent on the system to prepare for each day’s sales calls won’t tolerate the 24-hour response time defined in the SLA if their laptops aren’t working. Other users who become more dependent on their technology will add to the pressure to go beyond what was is stipulated in an SLA. In other words, SLAs are becoming less effective as the only tools for ensuring that user needs are met because technology’s importance to users is accelerating in many organizations (although unevenly from function to function).

In short, while SLAs are necessary to provide a base level of metrics against which the IT support function must perform, sole reliance on SLAs is likely to create unhappy and, at times, unproductive users

SLA Trap - Thinking outside the box..

While most organizations continue to rely on SLAs, some companies are setting a new course for measuring the value of IT support. The winners could be named as “support leaders”—companies that were providing highly effective IT support. On the other hand, If you compare their answers to those of organizations that we can call as “support laggards”—those struggling to address the support challenge. Well, the observation is that leaders escaped the SLA trap and adopted more business-oriented metrics to gauge their effectiveness. Such metrics are far different from the typical “the technology is working” measurements. For instance, a business unit with a printer problem that required a technician to be dispatched to make a repair. The technician replaced a part on the printer but inadvertently erased all the settings and failed to test the printer to see if it worked after completing the repair. The technician saw the issue as resolved: He replaced the part. Yet after he left, no one could print documents because the printer needed to be reprogrammed. The technician met his SLA. But the users were far from happy, and their productivity was compromised unnecessarily.