Rock Regan's CIO & Government Technology Blog

Sun, 07 May 2006 17:22:28 GMT

Online extra | Florida case offers lessons-learned for outsourcing. While Florida’s contract with Convergys Corp. of Cincinnati to consolidate and process human resource services for 32 state agencies has produced substantial benefits, it also serves as a stark example of what can go wrong when a government agency outsources certain functions to the private sector. [GCN.com State & Local News]

Sun, 07 May 2006 17:21:12 GMT

GAO: Immigration agency lacks IT focus for digital file project. Better IT project and vendor management must be in place before any money is spent on a $190 million plan to digitize millions of immigration records, the GAO said in a report harshly critical of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency.

[Computerworld News]

Sun, 07 May 2006 17:20:12 GMT

ISO Approves OpenDocument Format as an International Standard. The six-month approval ballot for its adoption as a standard by the International Standards Organization and the International Electrotechnical Commission ended on May 1. [GT News]

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:23:18 GMT

Five years of the federal security report card. A recap of House Committee of Government Reform's annual security report cards for the years 2001-2005.

[Computerworld News]

Sun, 19 Mar 2006 18:13:58 GMT

Whitepaper: Virtual Lab Automation

Akimbi realized an interesting whitepaper about automatic provisioning with virtualization:

Two trends in enterprise software development – the accelerating adoption of distributed application architectures (the service-oriented architecture, or SOA, being the state of the art approach) and the outsourcing of software development activities – are undermining the effectiveness and efficiency of prevailing enterprise software development lifecycle (SDLC) processes and the infrastructure supporting these processes. Across the board, enterprise software development organizations are grappling with:

Server Sprawl

Organizations face an explosion in the number of machines required to develop and test enterprise applications, with some application development (AD) organizations reaching server- to-staff ratios of greater than 7:1, even though average server utilization rates are often below 10%. Servers are hoarded under desks and duplicated across underutilized labs housed in data centers that are short on space, power and cooling capacity.

Setup and Provisioning Overhead

An enormous amount of time is wasted on repetitive system setup, provisioning and configuration tasks, done in preparation for software development and test activities. These tasks often account for more than 50% of the total time expended in an application development and test cycle.

Costly System Failures

Difficulties reproducing, diagnosing and correcting software defects discovered in remote development facilities, or by outsourcing partners, are leading to serious system failures in production, when the cost to repair can be over 470x higher than if resolved earlier in the AD process.
...

Download it here and consider attenting the related webcast .

- Alessandro Perilli [virtualization.info]

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 20:02:04 GMT

Texas Awards Contract for Statewide E-mail and Collaboration Software Services. Initially 13 state agencies, representing 65,000 seats, signed a letter of intent to participate in agreement [GT News]

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:53:21 GMT

Delivering applications in an enterprise environment Brian Madden posted a very interesting article about application delivery in a Windows environment.

He considered 9 ways to do so, including 3different with products like VMware and Softricity, underlying pros and cons:

Application Streaming and Virtualizatiion
Use something like Softricity to stream the application to the user’s device on demand
VMware PC
Build a huge VMware server and divide it into multiple VMs, with each VM running Windows XP. Provide remote access via XP’s built-in remote desktop
VMware Clients within Terminal Server / Citrix Sessions
Build a server and install terminal services and Citrix. Install VMware Workstation (or Microsoft Virtual PC) as a publish application in Citrix. Then “publish” a VMware disk image for each user. Users connect to the published VM via ICA

Read it at source.

Be sure to read comments as well. The first one states: Citrix should have bought VMware or vice versa and I found it pretty interesting. - Alessandro Perilli [virtualization.info]

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:52:49 GMT

How Player, Server and ESX Server will change the VMware sales channel

The introduction of free virtualization tools Player and Server aren't just going to change the virtualization market, but the company itself, starting from its sales channel.

At today VMware has a very articulated partnership network, counting Technology, OEM, Distributing, Reselling and Consulting partners.

Putting aside Technology partners, all others will be influenced and possibly invested by the VMware free virtualization strategy.

Resellers will be the first, real suffering part of the channel.

They are now divided in VIP Professional, authorized to sell VMware Workstation, ACE, VMTN, GSX Server and VirtualCenter products, and VIP Enterprise, authorized to sell all products (which translates in selling ESX Server, VirtualCenter and P2V Assistant).

GSX Server is gone for good, replaced by the free Server, and at today isn't clear if the new product will be supported by VirtualCenter or not.

At the same time Workstation sales will be partially corroded by spread of free Player, hugely boosted up by the recent VMware Challenge .

What VIP Professional will sell then? Workstation, ACE (which is in absolute the less pushed VMware product since ever) and the VMTN subscription.

But, and I speak after an experience of 1 year and a half heading a VMware VIP Professional reseller company in Italy, isn't a secret that buying Workstation or VMTN subscription by a reseller is quite unpractical for customers: both products can be bought online with immediate availability of registered serial numbers, while buying them through resellers take a whole month (and sometimes even more).

And considering low discounts a VIP Professional is able to apply, is quite unlikely a customer would give up online purchase just to save 10 dollars.

Finally, it's quite probable VMware will lower resellers discount margin at the Server market launch, to amortize the huge investment done converting GSX Server in a free solution.

So, whatever Server will have or not VirtualCenter support, VIP Professional are doomed to disappear, unable to sustain profits just selling few copies of ACE and a bunch of Workstation and VMTN.

On the other side Enterprise resellers and partially distributors will have soon to face problems as well: their sales, already compromised by direct bundling of VMware products with OEM datacenter hardware (IBM or HP for example), will lower even more when the so called Virtual Infrastructure 2.0 (ESX Server 3.0 + VirtualCenter 2.0) will be out on 2H 2006.

New features this release will offer and the many will follow with new releases, will oblige a customer, new to virtualization and decided to adopt it through ESX Server, to immediately buy certified servers (by IBM or HP for example) and a Storage Attached Network (by IBM or HP for example).

So the more powerful the VMware infrastructure wil become, the more chances OEMs will have to sell products from themselves, mutilating VIP Enterprise partners and distributors businesses.

At the same time Consulting partners will have every day less space, obliged to resell their skilled professionals directly to OEMs, which will be able (and are already able today) to offer a complete bundle to customers.

At a point, and I'm informed it's already happening, OEMs will give VMware products for free, just to place their hardware on customers datacenters. How others could ever compete?

At the end of the day we should expect a deep crisis in the sales channel unless VMware does one of these 2 things or both:

remodel the channel to adapt it to the ongoing strategy
release soon new products to be sold on today's sales infrastructure

In any case it won't be easy.

- Alessandro Perilli [virtualization.info]

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:41:46 GMT

California taps Unisys for tax management project. The California Employment Development Department has awarded a six-year, $31.6 million contract to Unisys Corp. to upgrade and expand the state’s tax engineering and modernization systems. [GCN Daily Updates]

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:34:34 GMT

Indian IS depts of multinationals manage offshoring too.

(InfoWorld) - Chief information officers of the Indian operations of multinational companies are increasingly managing software development and other IT work for their parent companies. The CIOs are taking on these responsibilities in addition to their main role of setting up and running the information systems for the local operations.

Pfizer Ltd., the Indian operation of Pfizer Inc. of New York, for example, works with software and services outsourcing companies in India to develop new systems for Pfizer entities worldwide, according to Arun Gupta, senior director for business technology at Pfizer Ltd.

Pfizer has set up centers of excellence in the Asian region, and three of these are in India, according to Gupta. "We are actually creating a lot of systems and standards which will be used by Pfizer globally," he said. IT staff at Pfizer India conceptualize the new systems, and then get outsourcing vendors involved in the development, validation, and implementation of the systems, Gupta added.

The Technology and Operations Group in India of Deutsche Bank AG not only meets the IS requirements of Deutsche Bank's commercial operations in India, but also manages the outsourcing of software development, business process outsourcing (BPO) and other operations to India by the German financial institution, said Arindam Banerrji, managing director and CIO for the India region of Deutsche Bank Group Technology and Operations.

Tyco Electronics Corp. India Pvt. Ltd., the Indian subsidiary of Tyco Electronics Corp. of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, is looking at getting into software development and services for the parent company, according to Sanjay Handu, director of strategic sourcing at Tyco India. Handu was head of IT at Tyco India until December. The IT skills required for outsourced software development will however be quite different from the skills of the staff that the company currently employs in its IS department, he added.

India's outsourcing valued at $60 billion by 2010

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VeriSign - SSL
VeriSign SSL Certificates secure ecommerce transactions

By John_Ribeiro@idg.com (John Ribeiro). [InfoWorld: Top News]

Sat, 18 Mar 2006 19:33:20 GMT

Watchfire to release FISMA compliance product. Watchfire Corp., a vendor of online risk management software, will on Monday release a new product designed to help U.S. government Web sites comply with a broad range of security, privacy and other federal regulations.

[Computerworld News]

Wed, 28 Dec 2005 20:11:15 GMT

CIO who brought OpenOffice to Massachusetts resigns.

(InfoWorld) - The state government official who had been moving Massachusetts away from Microsoft Corp.'s digital document formats has resigned. Peter Quinn, Chief Information Officer (CIO) for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts will quit his position, effective Jan. 9, according to an internal memo obtained by the IDG News Service.

Quinn had been behind a drive to change state computers so that they would no longer store documents in proprietary formats such as those used by Microsoft Office and Lotus Notes. Under a proposal drafted by Quinn's Information Technology Division, (ITD) in 2007, the state would begin a move to the OpenDocument file format, an open, XML-based format used by a variety of products including IBM Workplace and StarOffice.

By championing the move away from Microsoft, Quinn became a hero to the open-source community, but he also attracted a level of public scrutiny that disrupted his private and professional life. That attention played a role in his resignation, according to the memo.

"Over the last several months, we have been through some very difficult and tumultuous times," he wrote in the memo, which was sent on the evening of Dec. 24 to staff within the ITD. "Many of these events have been very disruptive and harmful to my personal well being, my family and many of my closest friends. This is a burden I will no longer carry."

According to observers, Quinn's support of OpenDocument had put him in a difficult position, which was made more difficult earlier this year, following the departure of his powerful supporter within Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney's administration, Administration and Finance Secretary Eric Criss.

The Romney administration recently launched an investigation into out-of-state trips taken by Quinn to speak at technology conferences over the past two years, following a report in the Boston Globe which questioned the appropriateness of such trips. Quinn was found to have done nothing wrong following the investigation, according to the Globe.

"I have become a lightning rod with regard to any IT initiative. Even the smallest initiatives are being mitigated or stopped by some of the most unlikely and often uninformed parties," Quinn wrote in his memo. "The last thing I can let happen is my presence be the major contributing factor in marginalizing the good work of ITD and the entire IT community."

Whether Quinn's departure will help or hinder the state's move away from Microsoft remains to be seen. Last month, Eric Criss's replacement, Tom Trimarco said that the state is optimistic that a newly proposed Microsoft format, called Office Open XML will meet the state's standards.

Microsoft has said that it plans to standardize Office Open XML through the International Organization for Standardization. (ISO) By doing this, the company would open up the formats for its Word, Excel and PowerPoint products.

One Boston attorney who has been following the matter said that it may be hard for Massachusetts to move away from the OpenDocument format (ODF) now. "One could assume that whoever stands in for [Quinn] on January 10 would first and foremost want to just keep his or her head down and out of the line of fire," wrote Andrew Updegrove, an attorney with Gesmer Updegrove LLP in an e-mail interview. "But on the other hand, the [story] has been so well covered, both in the formal press as well as in IT blogs, and the issues have been so well developed, that I also don't think that the powers that be in the Commonwealth can simply declare victory and scuttle ODF, either."

Whatever the fallout from Quinn's resignation. It seems clear that the next year's developments in Massachusetts will be closely watched.

"Massachusetts is the canary in the mine on this issue," John Palfrey, clinical professor of law and executive director of the Berkman Center on Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School, said recently. "If Massachusetts gets this right, others will follow."

China Martens in Boston contributed to this report