Re-corporatification of IT? TMT Tech trends continue to prove true

Came across the coverage of Intel's first quarter results. According to the Australian:

"The Silicon Valley giant, which said last month that revenue would suffer in the first quarter due to sagging PC sales, reported net income for the period grew just 3 per cent on overall revenue that was flat with the year-earlier ­period."

However, not all is bad. The article also noted that:
"Intel’s data centre group, which includes chips for server systems, posted a 19 per cent jump in revenue."


The shift in growth confirm's the Deloitte TMT Predictions for 2015:
"Consumers don’t always lead the way: The pendulum swings back to enterprise adoption
Historically, new technologies, like PCs and cellular phones, were adopted by the enterprise and then by the mass consumer market years later. In the last decade, it’s been the opposite. Tablets and smartphones with large screens were adopted widely by consumers first, but the pendulum will start to swing back. In 2014, consumer uptake of wearable technology like smart glasses was modest, signaling a shift away from the consumerization of IT. Enterprise adoption of wearables, 3D printing, drones and the Internet of Things (IoT) will have a bigger impact generating more economic value in goods and addressing business needs than the consumer market for those technologies"

Although not specifically mentioned in the press release, Intel's increased revenues is a confirmation that the shift from consumer IT to corporate IT is something that can't be ignored.


Author: Malik Datardina, CPA, CA, CISA. Malik works at Auvenir as a GRC Strategist that is working to transform the engagement experience for accounting firms and their clients. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent UWCISA, UW, Auvenir (or its affiliates), CPA Canada or anyone else.

Amazon & Drones: Role of "Regulation" in technology disruption

A number of news outlets reported Amazon's testing of drones up here in Canada. According to the Globe & Mail:

"U.S. companies like the online shopping juggernaut Amazon are increasingly choosing Canadian airspace to test new drones after being hamstrung by restrictive laws in their own country that could take up to two years to change, experts say"

Amazon showcased its vision for using drones to deliver light packages in late 2013 (see video below). However, they have been vocal about their frustration with the US regulator to test their innovation. 

The US regulators seems to have buckled under the pressure that the e-commerce giant put on them. According to Gizmodo:

"The Federal Aviation Administration has just given Amazon clearance to begin flight-testing the drones in the United States. Again. For real this time...This is the second time in as many months that the online retail giant has received a drone testing certificate from the FAA. Last time around, however, the certificate only applied to an already-obsolete prototype. Frustrated by the Feds’ inertia, Amazon recently began testing its delivery drones at a “top secret” location in Canada, just 2,000 feet from the US border."

We could explore this from a point of view of how we actually live in corporatocracy - where corporations with millions in the bank drive governmental policy instead of the average citizen. But let's not do that. Instead let's focus on how "regulation" itself can impact technological innovation.

I don't mean regulation just in the narrow sense of the "big bad government" passing this law or that statute. But a much broader concept of how societal conventions and how economic powerhouses in the Capitalist society actually determine the course of technological development.

Take for example the rise of the iPhone in the corporate environment. What allowed consumerization to take place (i.e. allowing users to connect their favourite smartphone devices to the network instead of the corporate devices) was that Microsoft took an open approach to licensing it Exchange Active Sync. They could have created a walled garden that allowed Windows Phone only to connect to their email server, however, they paved the way for iPhone and  Android to connect their devices to the corporate email server. Microsoft as the "regulator" of which mobile device can connect to its mail server - if you will - essentially enabled the iPhone and Android to displace our beloved BlackBerries from the corporate environment (for more on this see this post). Had Microsoft saw more profit in walling off the market for its own devices the ability for Apple iDevice to disrupt corporate IT would have been stifled if not suffocated.

Think this is an isolated incident? Unfortunately, that's what the hype wants you to believe

For example, David Sarnoff of RCA squashed FM radio in order to protect his AM Radio technology and pave the way for television. The inventor, Edwin Armstrong, who initially was Sarnoff's friend, had foolishly shared his technological innovations with him only to be betrayed by him. FM Radio technology had the potential to share data, such as faxes - back in the 1930s. Can you imagine the state of the wireless technology had this technology been allowed to flourish? Well that's the point. Sarnoff - as a regulator of radio technology - saw fit to erase it out of existence.

AT&T is another case in point. It ironically attempted to slay the then maverick David Sarnoff's  nascent radio technology. However, Sarnoff was able to work with the FCC and others to defend his fledgling start up, RCA, and beat the odds (unlike his "friend" Armstrong who ended up taking his life unable to achieve the same victory against Sarnoff). In 1934 AT&T blocked the answering machine for fear that it would undermine their business because "ability to record voice would cause business people to shun the telephone for fear of having their conversations recorded". So although much good came out of AT&T's Bell labs, the point is that it was effectively the one acting as which innovation saw the light of day and which did not.

What this illustrates is that the mythical innovator whose technological rises to the top through some kind meritocratic process is just that - a myth. Rather innovation is much more about how society appoints through or market mechanisms those that will ultimately sanction technology or kill it. We have the Internet because the inventors were part of a governmental DARPA project. If Bell labs had invented the TCP/IP protocol would they have taken the same route or would have it gone the way 1934 AT&T answering machine? To answer that would be pure speculation, but it is entire possible I wouldn't be writing this blog post if some "regulator" had decided otherwise.  

Big Data: Sliding down the Peak of Inflated expectations?

Anyone who follows enterprise IT or has had to research prospective solution would be familiar with the infamous Gartner Hype Cycle. As described in the link, it looks at technology going through a "bubblistic" growth curve. I am not sure if Gartner mentions this explicitly in the book that they published , but the Hype Cycle essentially captures the "herd mentality" that causes Bubbles to form in the Capitalist economic system. Efrim Boritz and I wrote a paper, "A Brief Review of Investment Bubbles throughout History", over a decade ago that analyzes the history of Bubbles going back to Tulipmania back in 1600s to the DotCom Bubble in 2000. In the paper we reference, John Cassidy's "Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold", as follows:

"According to Cassidy (2002) all speculative bubbles go through four stages: 1) displacement, when something changes people’s expectations about the future; 2) boom, when prices rise sharply and skepticism gives way to greed; 3) euphoria, when people realize the bubble can’t last but they want to cash in on it before it bursts; and 4) bust, when prices plummet and speculators incur great losses. "

So where does Gartner currently see Big Data fitting into the Hype Cycle?

According to the following, it is sliding down "Hype of Inflated Expectations":

Source: Gartner

And actually, there are a couple of facts that back up Gartner's claim. As I discussed in a previous blog post, Forrester cites data woes as continuing problem. For big data to be effective, the underlying data has to have "veracity"  (i.e. as per the definition). The more market driven, perhaps, is the fact that InfoWorld reported, citing a survey from Foote Partners, that "[p]remium pay for 58 big data-related skills and certifications declined by an average of 4.7 percent during the last nine months of 2014". More to the point InfoWord notes "there are signs of a slowdown as businesses learn that jumping into big data is not a recipe for instant ROI".

These factors illustrate how the Gartner Hype Cycle is useful for organizations to identify the current state tech trends to identify when is the right time for that organization to invest in the technology in order to minimize risk of the "bleeding edge" of early adoption but at the same time avoiding the risk of joining the party too late - being taken over by competitors.

Explaining Big Data Technology in under 2 minutes

The class I was teaching this week was looking at Big Data from multiple perspectives, including security. The approach I used with cloud last week was to identify the key differences between ASP and cloud. With Big Data the key difference is between the SQL world of relational databases and the non-relational world of NoSQL technologies, such as Hadoop.

I took a course on Big Data that explained how there is a distributed architecture that enables a "master" to send out the job to vast army of "slaves" to complete the processing. However, how do I explain this in a succinct and effective way to the students? 

In a word, YouTube.

I found this video that gives a pretty good overview of Big Data, but it's real value is how it explains how Hadoop works at a high level (go to 4:10):

Of course, we will be covering  social media later in the term :)

Google: Business Geniuses?

Just yesterday, I was talking to a colleague about Google's business strategy. As I mentioned on a previous post, Google's move into the phone and ISP markets illustrates it understands the importance of not being reliant on third parties to provide the "last mile" to the consumer. Instead, they need to make in-roads into the space to prevent being elbowed out by other players who want to use their muscle to exert anti-competitive behaviour on Google.

And Google should be afraid of such tendencies.

Contrary to Capitalist mythology, innovation does not trump all. In fact, if it is easier (i.e. more profitable) for the king of the mountain, so to say, to kick upstarts and start-ups off of the mountain, then they will do that rather than innovate. Take for example David Sarnoff of RCA. He worked to crush the FM radio technology - even though it was superior - to his AM radio technology because it would disrupt his business.

Coincidentally, the Globe and Mail reported that Google is making a push into the business arena:

"The tools include the ability to create separate personal and professional profiles on the same phone in an effort to reassure workers worried about their bosses snooping on their private lives. Even though the data is kept in separate silos, Google has created a way for work programs and personal apps such as Facebook to appear on the same home screen for convenience"

It seems that Google has adopted BlackBerry's "Balance" feature that enables it to separate personal and work related apps and data.

Google has a website dedicated to this initiative (for the announcement see here). The website also has an impressive list of partners who are working with Google on this. As evidenced by this video, this project had been officially unveiled last summer:



Given Google's eminence in Big Data and Cloud Computing, I am waiting to see how these features will be incorporated into future offerings that were focused on the enterprise.

Cyborg are here! Well not quite, but this is amazing!

True there has been a lot of excitement around drones, driver-less cars and robotics more generally. Each of these technologies herald an exciting potential to automate and make efficient tasks that are mundane. Amazon, most famously, is looking to see how drones will enable them to deliver their packages use this technology - replacing their need for couriers with a 24-7 army of robots.

With all that amazingness, there is something yet even more amazing - cyborgs! Wall Street Journal posted the following video today:



The seamless integration of machine and man has been the focus of science fiction for decades. However, the founders of personal computers actually always had such a vision in mind. I have been going through the Master's Switch by Tim Wu, a really amazing book on how yesterday's tech-entrepreneur becomes today's tech-mogul-tyrant squashing innovation (this is definitely a topic for another blogpost) . In the book, he also discusses how Douglas Engelbart came up with the idea that computers can be tools to augment human intelligence. When you think about your relationship with your smartphone or laptop, it is something to augment your intelligence. With this development, however, it takes it to the next level: to actually augment and repair the human being.

Can one expect the development of super soldiers? That too has been the story behind science fiction, but I wouldn't discount such a possibility outright.

TMT Predictions: Innovation heads back to the Enterprise?

One of the key trends in the recent years, has been the consumerization of IT.

What is the consumerization of IT?

In the first few decades of computing device, the focus of technological innovation was the enterprise. For example, mainframe computers were something only businesses could and would buy. However, that changed in the past decade. The focus of innovation became the consumer. With Moore's law eating away at the price of laptops, and the mobile device revolution with Apple & Google, it became easier for consumers to afford the latest and greatest device. Carrier subsidies for these devices also fueled the availability of the device. The culmination of this trend was the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), where companies allowed employees to bring the Macs or iDevice and attach it to the network. This made the employees happy (even though they had to support their own device) and the companies happy because they paid for less devices and saved around the administration and maintenance of these devices.

As an independent consultant, I experienced this trend first hand: I had better technology by way of laptops and mobile devices than multi-billion dollar clients.

In previous posts, (e.g. this one) we noted how this was one of the key factors in terms of eating BlackBerry's lunch: the corporate mobile device market.

Well, according Duncan Stewart & Paul Lee (and the rest of the TMT Predictions Team at Deloitte), the new trend they see coming is the re-enterprization of IT:

As they explain in the video, the specific areas that they see this as a trend are:

• Wearables
• 3D Printing
• Internet of Things 
• Drones

Finally, as they note at the end, the shift of focus back to the enterprise is advantageous from a fit perspective - devices from the ground up will be created to  meet the needs of the enterprise. From IS and audit perspective, the move will likely enhance the information security and information integrity as these technologies will be easier to integrate into the security architecture and the actual processing environment. 

For more on the TMT Tech trends, see here.