Stay up to date on IT's greatest challenges of the day, including "Business Continuity," theme of the week-long Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2001 in Orlando, Florida.

OPENING CEREMONIES
Business continuity is tops at Gartner Symposium
More than 6,000 IT execs converge on Orlando to get their priorities straight.

SYMPOSIUM UPDATE
Disaster planning goes beyond IT
A complete disaster plan must go well beyond bulletproofing IT and consider a variety of human factors.

KEYNOTE
Fiorina, Barrett emphasise innovation
Innovative technology is the key to tech industry's future success, declare HP and Intel CEOs.

COMMENTARY
Fiorina faces competitors, customers, hurdles
HP's CEO tells IT execs that the company can offer enterprise customers real alternatives to IBM's "give it all to us" approach. But David's not buying it.

SYMPOSIUM UPDATE
Simplicity key to successful Web services deployment
The Web services market represents a cross-section of technology and business processes, Gartner says.

Business continuity is tops at Gartner Symposium

Even in these trying times, the event opened on an upbeat note at one of Disney's Orlando area resorts. The ceremonies began with a spine-tingling rendition of the Star Spangled Banner by Gartner VP and accomplished harmonica player Richard Hunter. The anthem was applauded wildly by a packed ballroom of IT executives. Florida Governor Jeb Bush then took the stage to thank the more than 6,000 attendees for showing their patriotism, putting their fears aside, and travelling to the Sunshine State. Events such as the Gartner Symposium, Bush told the crowd, give the local economy and Florida's ailing tourism industry a much-needed boost.

Next, Gartner CEO Michael Fleisher got down to business, telling the audience of CIOs, tech execs, and IT managers that enterprises must get back into game 100 percent. "When we continue to play ball, we win, and the bad guys lose," he said. Fleisher went on to describe how these different and difficult times led Gartner to shift the priorities of many sessions, focusing on the event's major theme this year: business continuity. He then introduced a panel of Gartner analysts specialising in business continuity, including security analyst John Pescatore who recently blacklisted Microsoft's Internet Information Server.

Gartner analyst Donna Scott, who specialises in 24/7 uptime research, emphasised that in times of disaster, companies cannot afford to be planning for a disaster; rather, they must be executing their business recovery and resumption plans. Following her lead, the panel enumerated the many threats to business continuity and, in some cases offered tactical and strategic recommendations.

The panel's high-level recommendations, although lacking the detailed advice to be offered up later in the conference, did range from common sense ideas to measures that go beyond the responsibility of most IT departments.

The panel cited, for example, how most companies do not have up-to-date contact lists for their staffs, suppliers and customers -- a critical oversight should a disaster strike. Such lists should include alternate methods of contacting everyone, and standards should be established for less conventional communication methods such as instant messenging.

Coming off his perfectly executed harmonica performance, Gartner VP Richard Hunter talked about the threat from within -- employees who have access to sensitive assets. His recommended preventive measure: regular background checks.

Security analyst John Pescatore talked about external threats, citing the experience of storage vendor EMC. When a hacker tampered with a public document regarding EMC's financial condition, the company's stock price was virtually halved, causing significant business distraction and disruption. Later, Pescatore presented to a standing-room-only session under the guise of a red herring -- "the grand unified theory of Internet security." The most exploited vulnerability, Pescatore said, is a misconfigured server, and not the delayed application of security patches.

Going beyond a research company's traditional purview, Gartner analyst Roberta Witty emphasised many of the human issues involved in disaster preparedness. Witty suggested that companies consider more distributed environments, with key executives located in geographically dispersed offices. Although she suggested that there's a sweet spot between one central location and a fully distributed scenario, Hunter also cautioned "there is still no technology that provides the same juice of face-to-face contact."

Coming up later in the week: In addition to more traditional sessions on topics such as CRM, Web services, and XML, the conference will include presentations and vendor exhibits geared at giving technology executives the details they need to shore up the IT infrastructure. That infrastructure is considered by many, including Governor Bush, to be an essential component of freedom's ability to endure its latest threat.

Disaster planning goes beyond IT

Specifically, Gartner analyst Roberta Witty emphasised that disaster planning requires such preparations as geographic dispersal of key executives, virtual work environments, and grief counselling programs.

In light of the Sept. 11 tragedies, business continuity has emerged as a major theme at this year's Gartner conference. A complete business continuity plan, said analysts, requires the consideration of human factors. Gartner's panel of business continuity experts talked about how businesses must reconsider locating executives, staff, as well as IT systems and departments to multiple locations.

Some of the organisations that fared best following the Sept. 11 disaster were various stock exchanges and trade boards. These organisations, Gartner noted, are subject to laws and regulations regarding the fault tolerance of their information systems.

Adequate preparation, according to Gartner, also requires having a manager of business continuity. This member of the IT management team must be familiar with all the laws regulating the company's business as well as all the procedures of the local emergency management organisations.

One lesson learned from the World Trade Center disaster, according to Gartner analyst Donna Scott, is that companies with most of their staff, systems, and executives in one location will fair the worst. Citing the fast resumption times of organisations that have redundant centers, the panel noted that "it's not a good idea to locate a redundant data centre in the basement of the building across the street."

Scott suggested that companies have backup facilities and offices somewhere within 20 to 50 miles of the primary offices. "Any more," said Scott, "and you will have a transportation problem. Employees that survived won't be willing to go very far."

Scott acknowledged, however, that "a disaster like what happened at the WTC is different. There was really no way businesses could be prepared for such a complete loss of life, physical assets, communications systems, and transportation systems."

Gartner analyst Richard Hunter recommends striking a balance between distributed premises and what he calls "juice centres." According to Hunter, companies have to be careful not to cross the point of diminishing returns when pursuing a more geographically distributed approach. "Breaking up the company at departmental boundaries can make sense," according to Hunter. "But, in an effort to achieve more of a virtual working environment, breaking up workgroups where ongoing face-to-face contact is the juice that keeps things going isn't recommended." Suggesting that virtual office technologies such as video conferencing aren't there yet, Hunter said, "There is still no technology that provides the same juice of face-to-face contact."

Grief can have an extremely disruptive impact on any business emerging from a disaster, especially where loss of life is involved. "Having a grief counseling plan is equally important," according to Gartner's Witty.

Implementing many of these measures can add up to significant expense, analysts noted. But, Scott added, "the cheapest alternative to business continuity isn't always the best alternative."

Fiorina, Barrett emphasise innovation

The emphasis on innovation from these two key tech leaders appears to be a shot in the arm for the industry, considering its rather bleak state of health as described yesterday by Gartner CEO Michael Fleisher. In his keynote presentation, Fleisher asked the 5,000-plus attendees if they "could point to one truly innovative technology today that has the potential to transform how [they] transact in [their] businesses." Fleisher went on to say that real innovation has slowed because capital markets have not rewarded companies that have made R&D a priority. "Instead," said Fleisher, "tech suppliers were ramping for unending growth and are now being forced to suffer through embarrassing moments in a very public way. Most tech execs managed their companies as though the growth would never slow. Unlike the airline industry, no bailout is coming."

In light of recent events, Intel's Barrett made it clear that technology must move on. Barrett cited the company's substantial investment in optical networking. He said that converting photons to electrons requires a lot of discreet devices and suggested that to drive the technology and market, a company with high volume semiconductor expertise has to be brought into the optical networking area. Barrett also expects to see a price/performance revolution for servers similar to the one recently experienced on the desktop side.

Perhaps responding to Fleisher's question, Barrett made it clear that even powerful companies such as Intel could be swallowed by the competition if the drive to innovate doesn't prevail. The message struck a chord with Chicago-based David Rigney, a financial systems project manager for Gaylord Container, who found Barrett's remarks motivating. "I have to think the same way," said Rigney. "If I don't use the fastest, latest technology, my company will be swallowed, too." But, on this day, Rigney was most interested in hearing what HP's Fiorina had to say.

Gaylord Container is planning to move from Compaq's VMS platform to HP-UX, a transition that's required because Compaq is discontinuing the Alpha platform on which VMS runs. Rigney said, "I want to hear from [Fiorina] what HP will do to make that migration easier."

Fiorina echoed Barrett's call for innovation, adding that the word "Invent" will continue to be the HP's tagline. "We will continue to invent," said Fiorina. "We are now the number three generator of patents in the world. We generate five patents a day. A nanotechnology patent of ours was identified by MIT as one of five patents most likely to change the world." But Fiorina emphasised that success isn't about any single technology, but rather about solutions, fabrics, and end-point devices that add up to an experience.

Gaylord's Rigney got some of his migration questions answered -- but not all of them. Because of SEC regulations regarding mergers, the company is in a quiet period that prevents Fiorina from discussing specific plans. But Fiorina did say, "[HP's] clear intention is to have investment protection plans for CIOs who have invested in both HP and Compaq."

Referring to the seven operating systems involved in the HP/Compaq merger -- OpenVMS, Tru64, HP-UX, NSK, MPE, Windows, and Linux -- Gartner analyst Paul McGuckin said, "[Gartner] believes that there is a clear migration for all but one of the seven operating systems. The right thing for HP to do is to provide migration tools to move all of its existing customers to Windows XP or HP-UX running on Intel's Itanium platform. NSK (the highly fault-tolerant Himalaya technology) is one area where HP will have trouble since there is no Windows or HP-UX equivalent. The migration path there isn't as clear."

HP's chances of success in managing this migration on both the technology and sales fronts should be questioned, according to McGuckin. He agrees with Fiorina who has made it clear that success will hinge on execution, but he feels that "HP has significant hurdles to clear before they can deliver." Just three of those hurdles, according to McGuckin, are IBM, Sun, and Dell.

Fiorina faces competitors, customers, hurdles

When it comes to walking the walk and talking the talk of an IT executive, Fiorina had no peers, never once fumbling for words while speaking passionately and comprehensively about HP and Compaq's various businesses and platforms. It was as though a part of her had been attending every single workgroup meeting the two companies held over the last six months. That sort of attention to detail is impressive. But will it be enough to navigate the risky route of the proposed merger?

Fiorina fielded a wide range of questions about HP's future from Gartner vice presidents Paul McGuckin and Eric Rocco who specialise in Unix/Windows servers and IT services, respectively. It was especially appropriate that this pair was chosen to interrogate the HP CEO, given that Fiorina's message was very much about what HP will be doing in the server, data centre, and professional services spaces.

According to Fiorina, once the HP/Compaq merger is complete, the combined company will hit the ground running. Part of her reasoning is that both companies shared similar karma, something she said was apparent even before merger talks started.

Both had targeted Intel's Itanium as a strategic platform to move many of its existing customers to. This is a relatively easy proposition for customers already on the Windows platform, but both companies also have enterprise customers on other platforms and migrating them won't be so easy. For example, Compaq has customers running Tru64 Unix and OpenVMS on the Alpha architecture and, now that Alpha has been discontinued, the company's plan was to migrate them to Tru64 or Windows running on Itanium.

Likewise for HP, says Gartner's McGuckin. "The company is preparing to move all of its customers currently on proprietary architectures such as MPE and HP-UX [running on PA-RISC] to HP-UX or Windows." Again, these OSes would run on Itanium.

So, after the companies saw some commonalities and began talking merger, the two started to discuss what a merger might actually look like, even before talking to the bankers. In the days since, the two companies have been feverishly working on a comprehensive set of business and technology plans that simplify the combined roadmap. But those plans could cause migration headaches for customers.

According to Gartner's McGuckin, "All roads lead to HP-UX or Windows XP on Itanium." In other words, existing Tru64 and OpenVMS customers are now looking at HP-UX (instead of Tru64) or Windows XP as their only options. The lack of specifics about how this migration will be handled is the source of consternation for Symposium attendees such as University of Miami CIO M. Lewis Temares who has a significant investment in OpenVMS. Temares wanted to know what tools would be available for migration and who was going to show his staff how to use those tools, but he got no answers.

Remembering some of HP's recent announcements in the Linux arena, I asked McGuckin about the companies' focus on just Unix and Windows.

He felt that recent moves by HP in the area of secure Linux would be consumed by the combined company's obsession with Microsoft, which made sense to me. "The relationship with Microsoft will compromise HP's Linux position out of deference to Microsoft," says McGuckin. "Basically, Fiorina is saying that [HP] is going to be the power house Intel PC and server provider and biggest Microsoft partner. On the flip-side, Microsoft has no other obvious choice for taking their products into enterprise data centres." IBM, according to McGuckin and Rocco, has only half its heart in its relationship with Microsoft, and Unisys, Dell, and Sun aren't particularly strong alternatives.

Echoing some of Fiorina's statements regarding how Dell chose to resell storage from EMC rather than developing its own, McGuckin and Rocco said, "Dell will be there, but the company is passive on R&D, and needs to deliver better functionality. Unisys is not a major player anymore and Sun does as little as possible to satisfy customers from the IT services perspective; an important part of any vendor's enterprise strategy."

That pretty much leaves two players -- HP and IBM -- both with the ability to go global, both with very different approaches to their enterprise customers. When talk turned to IBM, Fiorina was fully prepared to rattle her sabre, and rattle it she did. Fiorina characterised IBM as an out-of-touch one-trick pony, saying "We are providing a real alternative to the proprietary, integrated 'let-me-give-it-all to IBM to make it all work.' "

Sorry Carly. While IBM, and its Global Services division does take the "give it all to us" approach with some of its customers, this by no means is its only approach, nor is the company a proprietary monolith. I'm not buying your explanation as a differentiator. In fact, I'm not buying the whole spiel, even though your gift of gab almost had me.

At times, Fiorina's own message contradicts itself. On one hand, she talks about the company's emphasis on "unifying architectures" (a reference to Itanium and Windows according to Gartner), and on the other, she touts HP's dedication to open, non-proprietary standards necessary to run a complex heterogeneous environment.

The truth? IBM's WebSphere is no more proprietary than Microsoft's .Net. In fact, many would argue it is more open because of its emphasis on Java. On the Internet side, both support the basic Web services protocols such as XML, SOAP, WSDL, and UDDI. But on the application server side, Microsoft's technology is based on the proprietary Windows, and IBM's is based on J2EE. Fiorina might argue that HP offers the same J2EE capabilities via its Bluestone products running on HP-UX but, then again, with two different approaches to Web services (.Net and J2EE), that's hardly a "unified architecture" plan.

Gartner's McGuckin agrees, saying "what she is saying is code for Intel running Microsoft and this is rhetoric that I would use if I were her. Solaris running on SPARC, or AIX running on IBM's PowerPC are no less open than HP-UX running on Itanium. It's all part of [the] poetry that [she] is trying to weave around us."

Thanks, Paul. Rhetoric--that was the word I was looking for.

Furthermore, on the IT services front, where Fiorina's plan calls for partnering with different professional services firms such as Accenture or PwC depending on the customers and their vertical markets (vs. IBM's singular Global Services approach), there is scant evidence that this strategy will actually work. Alliances, notwithstanding Microsoft and Intel's, are always a scary proposition. On the surface, it makes sense. Instead of trying to be all things to all customers like Global Services, partner with specific experts. But here again, Compaq customer and OpenVMS user Temares is skeptical. "If I need a consultant, what makes her think that she can negotiate a better deal with the professional services firms than I can. In my experience, I'm usually able to negotiate a better deal on my own, than when going through a third party."

So there you have it. HP will lead an alliance of technology companies (Microsoft and Intel) and professional services firms (Accenture, PwC, EDS, etc.) into battle against IBM, with Dell and Sun on the periphery getting dragged into various skirmishes.

When I asked Rocco and McGuckin who would win, neither was willing to commit. But McGuckin remains highly sceptical about HP saying, "We believe that HP has significant hurdles to clear before it can deliver."

While not the death knell for HP (it'll take a lot to kill a company that turns US$1.5 billion a quarter), the pulse reading here at Symposium regarding Fiorina's overtures isn't promising.

Simplicity key to successful Web services

While business continuity is a major theme at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2001, many of the other previously planned presentations, such as CRM, XML, and financial services, are still on track at the conference.

Gartner analyst David Smith's presentation on Web services, titled "Software as a Service Comes Alive," was well-timed for an audience only now coming up to speed on the nascent but standards-based component technology.

An informal poll of the session's attendees revealed that many were confused about what exactly Web services are. Some thought Web services and Application Service Providers (companies that provide applications as an Internet-based service) are the same thing. Others thought that service providers such as ISPs, Web hosting companies, and other Internet-based service provision companies are "Web services." Still others attended the session simply because they had heard that Web services are the next "hot thing."

Smith set the audience straight. Without making references to specific vendors, Smith criticised the industry for labeling Web services as the next big thing, noting that "Web services may be exciting, but they're no big deal." Prominent vendors that are hinging entire strategies on the Web services space include IBM and its WebSphere, Microsoft and its .Net, Sun with its Open Network Environment, HP with its recently acquired Bluestone software, and BEA with its J2EE-based WebLogic suite of products.

Suggesting that the Web services market represents a cross-section of technology and business processes, Smith characterised Web services as a low-risk technology that can be used to implement high-risk business processes. Surveying his audience, Smith discovered that roughly half the attendees were technologists while one-third were business people. The former group, he noted, is more concerned with implementation issues such as platform choices, while the latter group is more interested in the way Web services can be used to create stronger relationships with both suppliers and customers.

Citing the straightforward and easy-to-read text of XML -- one of the open standards used by Web services -- Smith characterised Web services as a much easier to use version of previous remote procedure call technologies (RPC). "A Web service," says Smith, "is basically an XML RPC." According to Smith, the primary technical and business goals for organizations considering Web services should be platform independence, the ability to distribute computing, scalability, and security. The result of successfully deployed Web services will be IT and business agility.

While the audience thinned some after Smith's detailed description of Web services, many remained to here him separate fact from fallacy with respect to the yellow pages of Web services: a standard known as UDDI. While UDDI makes it possible to search public networks for a Web service, Smith believes that the better and more useful deployments of UDDI will be on private networks.

Regarding platform selection, Smith displayed one of Gartner's trademark magic quadrant diagrams and identified HP's e-Speak as being a visionary technology.(A sound bite that HP CEO Carly Fiorina probably could have used in her keynote the following morning.) Although each of his charts showed Microsoft ahead of other players in the Web services space, Smith noted that "Java would come along, having a significant role." But for now, Smith added, "Sun is not yet a leader."

Smith advised that a cultural shift will be required of most developers before they can take on Web services. That shift will need to move more in the direction of a component re-use. But to really take advantage of Web services, Smith said that developers will have to start viewing software as a service, referring to a concept called SODA, or Service Oriented Development of Applications.

Once a company commits to the principles of re-use and SODA, Smith said, discipline will still be required. Suggesting that companies shouldn't get to ambitious, Smith said, "Developers must remember to keep it simple. The bigger a Web services project gets, the more likely it is to fail."

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