Most businesses seek competitive advantage through some kind of change. Whether they want to beat the competition to market with a new service or introduce new product categories, disruption is the norm.
The challenge in today's IT-centric world is that every one of those disruptions requires a software change, introducing the potential for downtime and lost revenue.
Change control and the associated risk mitigation is a big problem that every large organization faces. Last year, the London Stock Exchange crashed during a software change and was down for more than seven hours, costing traders millions, if not billions of dollars in lost business. This year we've had high profile outages at Salesforce.com, Twitter, and Amazon's EC2, among others, affecting tens of millions of people.
No company is immune to this type of risk and companies that want to stay on the leading edge need to embrace these changes in order to stay competitive.
Coverity, a software integrity firm perhaps best known for its SCAN project of open-source software sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security thinks it has the preventive medicine to help organizations avoid the inevitable errors, defects, and failures that software change can introduce.
The company's latest release, Coverity 5, promises to mitigate the business risk of software changes across an organization's entire software portfolio. It claims this is the first product that lets developers automatically map and identify how a single defect impacts multiple code bases, projects, and products. Through a unified defect management interface, it also can help organizations review, prioritize and triage their C/C++, Java and C# defects in a single work flow.
This approach lets an organization quickly answer five key questions of software change management:
- How do I find defects introduced by changes?
- How do I know the severity of new defects?
- How do I know the impact to my code, my projects, my products?
- How do I fix them fast?
- How do I know I fixed them?
Today, market opportunities are changing faster than businesses can deliver. When your organization changes software, how quickly can answer the five questions above?
Gamers are not just making purchases to enhance their gaming experience but also selling virtual assets to other players, according to new research from video game market research firm VGMarket.
Sales of virtual goods are expected to reach $1 billion this year and already generate near $4 billion annually in China. But there are some challenges, primarily the fact that once you convert your real money to virtual cash you can't readily get the dough back out.
The research revealed that in-game currency is the most frequently sold digital good from player to player and that two out of three sellers sold in-game currency in the last 12 months, earning a median of $22. PlaySpan, a provider of monetization and payment solutions for games and virtual worlds and sponsor of the research, considers that to be good news as its platform enables game developers to provide player to player marketplaces for their players. In addition, the PlaySpan Marketplace currently provides a secondary market for IMVU players to buy and sell goods as well.
One out of two sellers made a sale in a social network game over the last 12 months and earned a median of $50, while one out of four sellers made a sale in a free-to-play game over the last 12 months, with their median earning being $98, or nearly double that on social networks.
Eric Hartness, chief marketing officer at PlaySpan, told me that the secondary market is a boon for games, adding value, real and perceived, to all players by associating a real world dollar value on their playing time, game accounts, and digital items.
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Things are getting better for entrepreneurs, according to data released Tuesday by information services provider Chubby Brain.
Venture investment hit a multi-year low in the first quarter of 2009, reaching $5.3 billion in the second quarter and jumping a respectable 14 percent to $6.1 billion in the third quarter of 2009.
Statistics in The Pulse of the Innovation Economy report for Q309 certainly help quantify a resurgence in Silicon Valley, but we can't forget that entrepreneurs drive innovation, while venture capitalists facilitate it. Yes, money is often necessary, but the entrepreneurial need to solve complex problems is what has propelled the information economy.
A few highlights:
- Invested dollars went up by 14 percent, with an 11 percent increase in number of deals
- September seemed to be right time to raise money with 40 percent of third-quarter deals occurring in the month
- California, and specifically the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley is the most likely location to raise money.
- Health care investing saw the most activity while green investors sat on their recycling cans
It should come as no surprise that the San Francisco Bay Area/Silicon Valley is responsible for a large portion of third-quarter funding, taking 7 of the top 10 ranking spots. This is not a knock against other geographies, just a realistic recognition of how densely packed the valley is with VCs.
... Read moreNew data from IDC's Cloud Services Forecast shows that cloud services will outpace traditional IT spending over the next five years and will represent $44.2 billion, or roughly 10 percent, of all IT spending by 2013.
However, the missing link in this data set is that these numbers account only for IDC's cloud services taxonomy (Application Software, Application Development and Deployment Software, Systems Infrastructure Software, and Server and Disk Storage capacity) and don't represent private clouds.
Private clouds--or at least internal enterprise applications that use the same principles--will undoubtedly become a major trend over the next five years. In addition to the cost savings of using existing compute power, the ease of use of cloud APIs will work their way into the enterprise quickly, now that developers are comfortable with public cloud services like Amazon S3 and EC2.
If public cloud services will be 10 percent of all IT money spent, that represents a blisteringly fast growth rate. And while we certainly don't wish the recession to continue, it's interesting to see how companies have adapted their IT plans to take advantage of services that require far less capital expenditure. From IDC:
The five-year growth outlook remains strong, with a five-year annual growth rate of 26 percent--over six times the rate of traditional IT offerings. In spite of the challenging economy--or more accurately, because of it--this growth rate advantage expanded from last year's forecast, in which cloud services were forecast to grow at over five times traditional offerings.
There is no question that cloud services are in their infancy and that the market is ripe for further disruption. The challenge going forward will be to accurately measure just what applications and services are internal, external, cloud, or otherwise.
In the meantime, let's all just be glad to see IT spending on the rise.
New data released by Gambit, a micro-transaction platform provider, illustrates the complexity of both customer targeting and analyzing micro-transaction buying patterns. The major takeaway: older players seem like a good target market until you dig in to find out that they don't spend a whole lot.
But, it takes a minute to understand the data, as Gambit's Susan Su points out in a blog post on how age impacts social-gaming monetization. While it would appear that older users are a good target market thanks to their high revenue-per-user statistic, they are actually pretty meaningless in terms of revenue.
So what does this mean for game developers looking to monetize users?
First, the older demographic shouldn't be ignored as it offers a very high revenue-per-user ratio. Second, it shows that younger gamers are figuring out ways to pay for things, leading me to believe that alternative noncash payment platforms such as game cards and in-game currency have a strong future.
The other important factor in this data is that game developers (and really any marketers) need reliable data to target the best customer. Even customers with low annual revenue figures can be very meaningful provided you can find enough of them. Think of Paypal or Visa in terms of low-margin high-volume transactional systems that bring in high-quality revenue streams.
(Thanks to Susan Su (@susanfsu)of Gambit Payments for use of the data.)
A Swedish organization called the Youth Care Foundation claims that computer gaming addiction is reaching pandemic proportions around the world. This is the same group that called World of Warcraft "the cocaine of the computer games world" back in February.
In an interview with Sweden's English paper, The Local, Sven Rollenhagen of the Youth Care Foundation touts his position as one that helps young people in Sweden recognize and manage computer gaming addiction.
Already ahead of the curve by "daring" to view gaming addiction as something distinct from other common problems facing young people, Sweden's Youth Care Foundation has put the country on the map as a leader in developing strategies for coping with the issue.
"Sweden has long been at the forefront of efforts to battle addiction," he said, adding that there are very few, if any, experts elsewhere in the world who have dedicated their work completely to the study and management of gaming addiction.
Obviously addiction should be taken seriously, but to suggest that we risk a pandemic of strung-out child gamers is just ridiculous. As it turns out, parents can turn off or simply take the games out of the kids hands, thwarting the game-play demons.
"If you extrapolate from the number of calls we received or simply from the millions of games that are sold around the world each year, you start to see how big the pool of potential addicts is," he said.
Extrapolating data is a tried and true tactic to conflate statistics, and in fact has provided plot-lines for both the Simpsons and Family Guy. It's also part of the renewed FCC investigation into Janet Jackson's 2004 Superbowl wardrobe malfunction wherein the number of complaints was extrapolated in order to prove a point, rather than provide a true statistical analysis.
I'd write some more but I have to get through the WoW Burning Steppes before a Blood Elf steals my gold.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
In the year since the worst financial meltdown in modern history, many financial institutions are still seeking to identify the root causes of the crisis and develop new ways to re-invent their business processes to ensure that such an event can never occur again.
In addition to human error, over-reaching risk, and simple greed, there was a key technology component that has been overlooked by most reports. According to Bob Picciano, General Manager of IBM Lotus Software and IBM Collaboration, this technological fault was made up of two elements; the lack of corporate-wide computer program integration at most banks, and a complete lack of data transparency.
As a result of these shortcomings, not only were financial institutions unable to track or even to understand their overall risk position, but they lacked a single view of each trade or client in order to "triage" the crisis as it unfolded.
This is not an uncommon scenario and it's one that many pieces of software have tried to address via dashboard, portals, etc. But the systems need to have the right data in order to provide meaningful information.
Many banks are running applications that are older than the workers who use them--which is not necessarily wrong provided that these core systems can accommodate new ways to view and parse data.
Replacing a core banking system is akin to conducting a simultaneous heart and lung transplant on a patient that is still jogging. It's just not realistic. And, since banks can't afford to simply shut down their operations in order to transition to new applications, these vital upgrades were put on hold indefinitely.
Even as events were finally catching up to the banks across the globe, they still resisted replacing their aging core banking systems, despite the fact that the cost of maintaining these systems was becoming more and more prohibitive. For example, IBM research suggests that application and infrastructure maintenance can often account for as much as 85 percent of a bank's IT budget.
This is finally beginning to change. To help facilitate these global upgrades, as part of its Smarter Planet initiative, IBM is unveiling a new Banking Framework that will allow banks to effectively structure and integrate their applications and better manage their data.
The IBM Banking Industry Framework addresses four key areas that demand the majority of a banks attention and resources, providing a path to accelerate transformation, and system upgrade with an eye towards future needs and reduced project risk. The features of the framework include:
- An integrated risk management domain to support a holistic approach to managing financial risk, operational and IT risk, financial crimes detection and prevention, and compliance.
- The customer care and insight domain helps banks build a foundation for creating a single view of the customer and enabling more effective and efficient sales and service.
- The payments and securities domain helps banks progressively transform their payments operations to become more flexible and efficient.
- The core banking transformation domain allows banks to modernize and renovate existing systems that sustain core banking functions while aligning with the changing needs of the business.
Based on a mature model already used by more than 250 banks and 150 insurance companies, the framework provides a methodology for completing gradual core banking transitions on a step by step basis, rather than all at once.
It also has the fail-safe aspect of being based on a tried and tested method that not only reduces the risk inherent in any transition, but also allows easy standards-based integration with other systems the institution may decide to incorporate at a later date.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
New research from video game market research firm VGMarket sponsored by Playspan reveals that gamers are actively making purchases to enhance their gaming experience, with free-to-play games leading the way to monetization. Playspan is a provider of monetization and payment solutions for games and virtual worlds.
Three out of four virtual goods buyers purchased in-game currency in the last 12 months and spent approximately $50 each. This statistic is interesting to me as I am always surprised when users buy in to currency that only works on one site. But, I suppose if it's the only option then you will eventually give in.
Of further interest in the report is the fact that free-to-play games may actually be monetizing better than MMOs (massive multiplayer online games) and social networks.
- 58 percent made purchases in free-to-play (F2P) games over the last 12 months.
- 34 percent made purchases in MMOs.
- 23 percent made purchases in social network games.
- The average respondent is currently playing three online games and 80 percent report buying digital goods for their own use while 20 percent said they purchase for gifts.
New data from The Nielsen Company reflects some interesting new trends related to both the worldwide recession and the somewhat incongruous growth of Web browsing on mobile phones. In a nutshell, users are looking for mobile phone services, food and cooking sites, and coupons, all of which make perfect sense in today's economy.
Web sites related to mobile phones--both handsets and services--showed the highest traffic growth in the UK posting 58 percent growth on a year-to-year basis. According to Nielsen:
Visits to Nokia's site grew by 203 percent, while Vodafone and O2 also posted solid growth (91 percent and 79 percent, respectively). At the same time, schemes that enable consumers to recycle their old mobiles for cash drove more people to related Web sites for information.
Food and cooking sites (as well as television programming) have taken the place of real estate and home design obsessions as people look for comfort that's accessible on a lower budget than property or remodeling.
And, of course, promotional and coupon sites remain major themes as we all look to get more bang for the buck.
Of interest is the fact that much of the traffic to these sites is driven by specific marketing program, several of which contain social aspects, such as Coca-Cola's "Coke Zone," which offers rewards and prizes by collecting points from specially-marked bottles that can be redeemed online.
From a branding perspective this is good news as companies can tie in programs with online properties that are significantly easier and less expensive to maintain. And, the valuable data they get from consumer behavior can more readily be put to good use once users actions are able to be tracked in a consistent manner.
Follow me on Twitter @daveofdoom.
EnterpriseDB on Monday announced an Oracle Migration Assessment Program after Oracle recently raised prices on database modules by as much as 40 percent. This comes on the heels of license increases of up to 20 percent in 2008.
The program enables enterprises to migrate their applications running on Oracle to Postgres Plus Advanced Server, an open-source PostgreSQL-based database containing an Oracle compatibility layer, "with no disruption to operations, and delivers ongoing cost savings of 50 percent or more."
"Oracle's price hikes might be good news for those on Wall Street, but they're terrible news for IT departments trying to function in the worst economy since the Great Depression," said Ed Boyajian, president and CEO of EnterpriseDB.
It's no secret that Oracle is good at pricing--at least from its perspective. I can certainly understand why Oracle customers would be interested in a program that allows them to make a switch to a less expensive option that provides the same functionality.
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