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Event Report - Oracle Openworld 2015 - Top 3 Takeaways, Top 3 Positives & Concerns

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Holger Mueller is VP and Principal Analyst for Constellation Research for the fundamental enablers of the cloud, IaaS, PaaS and next generation Applications, with forays up the tech stack into BigData and Analytics, HR Tech, and sometimes SaaS. Holger provides strategy and counsel to key clients, including Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers, Chief Product Officers, Chief HR Officers, investment analysts, venture capitalists, sell-side firms, and technology buyers.  Coverage Areas: Future of Work Tech Optimization & Innovation  Background: Before joining Constellation Research, Mueller was VP of Products for NorthgateArinso, a KKR company. There, he led the transformation of products to the cloud and laid the foundation for new Business Process as a…...

We had the opportunity to attend Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week. The conference was again the usual spread out affair, with e.g. JavaOne happening at the Hilton, the HR events happening at the Palace Hotel etc. Official attendance was 60k+ - it felt the same as last year.

So take a peek:

If you can't watch - here is the gist:

Top 3 Takeaways

IaaS is here - There was something missing on the Oracle Cloud architecture, and that was IaaS. As Ellison shared candidly, Oracle built SaaS, realized that it needed PaaS and building PaaS it needed IaaS. So Oracle found its way to the cloud top down, with the important auto-scaling feature coming in 2 weeks / later this year. Pricing is attractive, as Ellison put it - Oracle dedicated instances will be at 50% of AWS flexible instances cost wise. And Storage will be at 1/10 of AWS S3. So cost will not be an issue / argument moving to Oracle's cloud.
More Multitenancy, please - Oracle introduced multitenancy at the database level 2 years ago with Oracle 12c, this year it showed the transfer of a database container from data center A to data center B while writing to the database. And it introduced the largest extension to WebLogic, making JVMs multitenant, a key reliability and flexibility addition to running Java applications (needless to say Oracle announced Docker support, too).
SCM closes the suite - SCM was the holdout on the Oracle Cloud Suite, and Oracle announced key new additions and products to address this gap. Coupled with the also announced e-commerce products, this announcement as well as the progress of the rest of the SaaS products makes the Oracle offering likely the most complete suite in the cloud. Or on premises as Oracle keeps supporting the duality of deployment.

Top 3 Positives

The chip-to-click stack becomes more real - With autoscaling the Oracle integrated tech stack learns a key trick to become a cloud infrastructure stack in regards of operational TCO. But also good news for on premises customers who can run workloads in a more elastic way.
SaaS Suite gets complete - With key SCM functionality and a new e-commerce suite Oracle adressess both gap and good house-keeping in its SaaS suite, which is now complete in terms of all major funtional areas.
Differentiation Sprinkles - No other large application vendor talks as much and has an as clear DaaS vision as Oracle. The analytical models are sane, too, as a quick conversation with the Datalogix team concluded. And then Oracle keeps creating value for the citizen developer and citizen integrator, allowing business end users to create mobile, web applications and integrations.

Top 3 Concerns

Will it all work? - Oracle is likely to undertake the largest engineering project with developers having the same logo on their paychecks. It all has to work seamlessly together, and Oracle has a checkered quality record in the past. To be fair, quality issues have been much less creating headlines for the vendor in the recent past.
Can Oracle sell it? - The challenge moves now from engineering to go to market, sales through direct and indirect channels. Oracle needs to onboard 1000s of partners in order to maintain the same relevancy in the future that it has today.
A relationship test - Oracle customers usually have less love lost for their vendor than for most other vendors in the market. That relationship needs to improve in order to become a service provider, where renewals are frequent and regular. Very different to the perpetual license model.

MyPOV

Oracle keeps executing along the vision of the 'IBM of the 21st century' - the single stop for everything an enterprise needs - on premises and in the cloud. The cloud viability has been notched up by significant degrees with the product progress shared at this OpenWorld. Good for customers, as they will get stronger and richer products. It is clear that horizontal integration inside the layers of the technology stack (e.g. a complete SaaS Suite, an powerful PaaS platform) are desirable for customers. How many layers of vertical integration are desired is less certain and will be the interesting story to watch, as we never had that many layers to deploy hardware and software to in the past, and the once upon a time model of the IBM stack feel apart in the 70ies of last century. Exciting times ahead, we will be watching and analyzing, stay tuned.

---------------

I compiled a short presentation with all first 22 press releases of this OpenWorld being discussed - take a look:

No time to watch - checkout the presentation below:

Oracle OpenWorld - A quick take on all 22 press releases of Day #1 - #3 from Holger Mueller

More on Oracle OpenWorld:

News Analysis - Quick Take on all 22 press releases of Oracle OpenWorld Day #1 - #3 - read here
First Take - Oracle OpenWorld - Day 1 Keynote - Top 3 Takeaways - read here
Event Preview - Oracle Openworld - watch here

Future of Work / HCM / SaaS research:

Event Report - Oracle HCM World - Full Steam ahead, a Learning surprise and potential growth challenges - read here
First Take - Oracle HCM World Day #1 Keynote - off to a good start - read here
Progress Report - Oracle HCM gathers momentum - now it needs to build on that - read here
Oracle pushes modern HR - there is more than technology - read here. (Takeaways from the recent HCMWorld conference).
Why Applications Unlimited is good a good strategy for Oracle customers and Oracle - read here.

Also worth a look for the full picture

Event Report - Oracle PaaS Event - 6 PaaS Services become available, many more announced - read here
Progress Report - Oracle Cloud makes progress - but key work remains in the cellar - read here
News Analysis - Oracle discovers the power of the two socket server - or: A pivot that wasn't one - TCO still rules - read here
Market Move - Oracle buys Datalogix - moves more into DaaS - read here
Event Report - Oracle Openworld - Oracle's vision and remaining work become clear - they are both big - read here
Constellation Research Video Takeaways of Oracle Openworld 2014 - watch here
Is it all coming together for Oracle in 2014? Read here.
From the fences - Oracle AR Meeting takeaways - read here (this was the last analyst meeting in spring 2013)
Takeaways from Oracle CloudWorld LA - read here (this was one of the first cloud world events overall, in January 2013)

And if you want to read more of my findings on Oracle technology - I suggest:

Progress Report - Good cloud progress at Oracle and a two step program - read here.
Oracle integrates products to create its Foundation for Cloud Applications - read here.
Java grows up to the enterprise - read here.
1st take - Oracle in memory option for its database - very organic - read here.
Oracle 12c makes the database elastic - read here.
How the cloud can make the unlikeliest bedfellows - read here.
Act I - Oracle and Microsoft partner for the cloud - read here.
Act II - The cloud changes everything - Oracle and Salesforce.com - read here.
Act III - The cloud changes everything - Oracle and Netsuite with a touch of Deloitte - read here.

Finally find more coverage on the Constellation Research website here and checkout my magazine on Flipboard and my YouTube channel here.

Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience Future of Work New C-Suite Data to Decisions Openworld Oracle SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer

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Who buys Bitcoin for Identity?

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Steve Wilson is former VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, leading the business theme Digital Safety and Privacy. His coverage includes digital identity, data protection, data privacy, cryptography, and trust. His advisory services to CIOs, CISOs, CPOs and IT architects include identity product strategy, security practice benchmarking, Privacy by Design (PbD), privacy engineering and Privacy [or Data Protection] Impact Assessments (PIA, DPIA). Coverage Areas: -  Identity management, frameworks & governance-  Digital identity technologies-  Privacy by Design -  Big Data; “Big Privacy”-  Identity & privacy innovation Previous experience: Wilson has worked in ICT innovation, research, development and analysis for over 25 years. With double…...

You'll have to forgive the deliberate inaccuracy in the title, but I just couldn't resist the wordplay. The topic of this blog is the use of the blockchain for identity, and not exactly Bitcoin, which I appreciate is not the same thing. By my facetiousness and by my analysis, you'll see I don't yet take the identity use case seriously.

In 2009, Bitcoin was launched. A paper was self-published by a person or persons going by the nom de plume Satoshi Nakamoto, called "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" and soon after an open source software base appeared at http://www.bitcoin.org. Bitcoin offered a novel solution to the core problem in electronic cash: how to prevent double spending without reverting to a central authority. Nakamoto's conception is strongly anti-authoritarian, almost anarchic, with an absolute rejection of fiat currency, reserve banks and other central institutions. Bicoin and its kin aim to change the world, and by loosening the monopolies in traditional finance, they may well do that.

Separate to that, the core cryptographic technology in Bitcoin is novel, and so surprising, it's almost magical. Add to that spell the promises of "security" and "anonymity", and we have a powerful mix that some people see stretching far beyond mere money, and into identity. So is that a reasonable step?

Bitcoin’s secret sauce

A decentralised digital currency scheme requires some sort of community-wide agreement about when someone spends a virtual coin, so she cannot spend it again. Bitcoin’s trick is to register every single transaction on one public tamper-proof ledger called the blockchain, which is refreshed in such a way that the whole community in effect votes on the order in which transactions are added or, equivalently, the time when each coin is spent.

No proof of identity or KYC check is needed to register a Bitcoin account; currency – denominated "BTC" – may be transferred freely to any other account. Hence Bitcoin may be called anonymous, although the unique account identifiers are set in stone, providing a indelible money trail that has been the undoing of many criminal Bitcoin users.

The continuous arbitration of blockchain entries is done by a peer-to-peer network of servers that race each other to double-check a special hash value for the latest refreshed chain. The particular server that wins each race is rewarded for its effort with some Bitcoin. The ongoing background computation that keeps a network like this honest is referred to technically as "Proof of Work" and since there is a monetary reward for helping run the BTC network, the servers are colloquially called miners.

Whether or not Bitcoin lasts as a form of electronic cash, there is a groundswell of enthusiasm for the blockchain as a new type of decentralized public ledger technology (DLT) for a much broader range of transactions, including “identity”. The shudder quotes are deliberate on my part, reflecting that the blockchain-for-identity speculations have not been clear about what part of the identity puzzle they might solve.

For identity applications, the reality of Bitcoin mining creates some particular challenges which I will return to. But first let’s look at the positive influence of Bitcoin and then review some of its cryptographic building blocks.

Bitcoin inspirations

Bitcoin solves what was thought to be an unsolvable problem - double spending of electronic cash. It's the latest example of a wondrous pattern in applied maths. Unsolvable problems are, in fact, solved quite often, after which frenetic periods of innovation can follow. The first surprise or prototype solution is typically inefficient but it can inspire fresh thinking and lead to more polished methods.

One of the greatest examples is Merkle’s Puzzles, a theoretical method invented by Ralph Merkle in 1974 for establishing a shared secret number between two parties who need only exchange public pieces of data. This was the holy grail for cryptography, for it meant that a secret key could be set up without having to carry the secret from one correspondent to the other (after all, if you can securely transfer a key across a long distance, you can do the same with your secret message and thus avoid the hassle of encryption altogether). Without going into detail, Merkle’s solution could not be used in the real world, but it solved what was thought to be an unsolvable problem. In quick succession, practical algorithms followed from Diffie & Hellman, and Rivest, Shamir & Adleman (the names behind “RSA”) and thus was born public key cryptography.

Bitcoin has spurred dozens of new digital currencies, with different approaches to ledgers and arbitration, and different ambitions too (including Ripple, Ethereum, Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Colored Coins). They all promise to break the monopoly that banks have on payments, radically cut costs and settlement delays, and make electronic money more accessible to the unbanked of the world. These are what we might call liquidity advantages of digital currencies. These objectives (plus the more political promises of ending fiat currency and rendering electronic cash transactions anonymous or untraceable) are certainly all important but they are not my concern in this blog.

Bitcoin's public sauce

Before looking at identity, let's review some of the security features of the blockchain. We will see that safekeeping of each account holder's private keys is paramount - as it is with all Internet payments systems and PKIs.

While the blockchain is novel, many elements of Bitcoin come from standard public key cryptography and will be familiar to anyone in security. What's called a Bitcoin "address" (the identifier of someone you will send currency to) is actually a public key. To send any Bitcoin money from your own address, you use the matching private key to sign a data object, which is sent into the network to be processed and ultimately added to the blockchain.

The only authoritative record of anyone's Bitcoin balance is held on the blockchain. Account holders typically operate a wallet application which shows their balance and lets them spend it, but, counter-intuitively, the wallet holds no money. All it does is control a private key (and provide a user experience of the definitive blockchain). The only way you have to spend your balance (that is, transfer part of it to another account address) is to use your private key. What follows from this is an unforgiving reality of Bitcoin: your private key is everything. If a private key is lost or destroyed, then the balance associated with that key is frozen forever and cannot be spent. And thus there has been a string of notorious mishaps where computers or disk drives holding Bitcoin wallets have been lost, together with millions of dollars of value they controlled. Furthermore, numerous pieces of malware have - predictably - been developed to steal Bitcoin private keys from regular storage devices (and law enforcement agencies have intercepted suspects' private keys in the battle against criminal use of Bitcoin).

You would expect the importance of Bitcoin private key storage to have been obvious from the start, to ward off malware and destruction, and to allow for reliable backup. But it was surprisingly late in the piece that "hardware wallets" emerged, the best known of which is probably now the Trezor, released in 2013. The use of hardware security modules for private key management in soft wallets or hybrid wallets has been notably ad hoc. It appears crypto currency proponents pay more attention to the algorithms and the theory than to practical cryptographic engineering.

Identifying with the blockchain

The enthusiasm for crypto currency innovation has proven infectious, and many commentators have promoted the blockchain in particular as something special for identity management. A number of start-ups are "providing" identity on the blockchain - including OneName, and ShoCard - although on closer inspection what this usually means is nothing more than reserving a unique blockchain identifier with a self-claimed pseudonym.

Prominent financial services blogger Chris Skinner says "the blockchain will radically alter our futures" and envisages an Internet of Things where your appliances are "recorded [on the blockchain] as being yours using your digital identity token (probably a biometric or something similar)". And the government of Honduras has announced that American Bitcoin technology firm Factom will build a blockchain-based land title registry, which they claim will be "immutable", resistant to insider fraud, and extensible to "more secure mortgages, contracts, and mineral rights". Interestingly, the Factom-Honduras project stalled for the second half of 2015. I find it emblematic of the whole blockchain craze that one of the most popular use cases for decentralized ledger technology is little more than a press release.

While blockchain aficionados have been quick to make a leap to identity, the opposite is not the case. The identerati haven't had much to say about blockchain at all. Ping Identity CTO Patrick Harding mentioned it in his keynote address at the 2015 Cloud Identity Summit, and got a meek response from the audience when he asked who knew what blockchain is (I was there). Harding's suggestions were modest, exploratory and cautious. And only now has blockchain figured prominently in the twice-yearly freeform Internet Identity Workshop unconference in Silicon Valley. I'm afraid it's telling that all the initial enthusiasm for blockchain "solving" identity has come from non identity professionals.

What identity management problem would be solved by using the blockchain?

The most prominent challenges in digital identity include the following:

account creation including validation of identity or other attributes
the cost and inconvenience of multiple account registrations
the inconvenience and insecurity of multiple usernames and passwords
identity theft and account takeover
interoperability of identity data or attributes between services and applications
provenance of attributes.

What does the blockchain have to offer?

Certainly, pseudonymity is important in some settings, but is rare in economically important personal business, and in any case is not unique to the blockchain. The secure recording of transactions is very important, but that’s well-solved by regular digital signatures (which remain cryptographically verifiable essentially for all time, given the digital certificate chain). Most important identity transactions are pretty private, so recording them all in a single public register instead of separate business-specific databases is not an obvious thing to do.

The special thing about the blockchain and the proof-of-work is that they prevent double-spending. I’ve yet to see a blockchain-for-identity proposal that explains what the equivalent “double identify” problem really is and how it needs solving. And if there is such a thing, the price to fix it is to record all identity transactions in public forever.

The central user action in all blockchain applications is to “send” something to another address on the blockchain. This action is precisely a digital (asymmetric cryptographic) signature, essentially the same as any conventional digital signature, created by hashing a data object and encrypting it with one’s private key. The integrity and permanence of the action comes from the signature itself; it is immaterial where the signature is stored.

What the blockchain does is prevent a user from performing the same action more than once, by using the network to arbitrate the order in which digital signatures are created. In regular identity matters, this objective simply doesn’t arise. The primitive actions in authentication are to leave one’s unique identifying mark (or signature) on a persistent transaction, or to present one’s identity in real time to a service. Apart from peer-to-peer arbitration of order, the blockchain is just a public ledger - and a rather slow one at that. Many accounts of blockchain uses beyond payments simply speak of its inviolability or perpetuity. In truth, any old system of digitally signed database entries is reasonably inviolable. Tamper resistance and integrity come from the digital signatures, not the blockchain. And as mentioned, the blockchain itself doesn't provide any assurance of who really did what - for that we need separate safeguards on users' private keys, plus reliable registration of users and their relevant attributes (which incidentally cannot be done without some authority, unless self-attestation is good enough).

In addition to not offering much advantage in identity management, there are at least two practical downsides to recording non Bitcoin activity on the blockchain, both related to the proof-of-work. The peer-to-peer resolution of the order of transactions takes time. With Bitcoin, the delay is 10 minutes; that’s the time taken for an agreed new version of the blockchain to be distilled after each transaction. Clearly, in real time access control use cases, when you need to know who someone is right away, such delay is unacceptable. The other issue is cost. Proof-of-work, as the name is meant to imply, consumes real resources, and elicits a real reward.

So for arbitrary identity transactions, what is the economics for using the blockchain? Who would pay, who would be paid, and what market forces would price identity, in this utopia where all accounts are equal?

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News Analysis - Quick Take on all 22 press releases of Oracle OpenWorld Day #1 - #3

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Oracle has unleashed the usual barrage of press releases at OpenWorld, happening right now in San Francisco.

I compiled a short presentation with one slide for each press release and MyPOV in them - take a look:

If you don't have time to watch - I posted the presentation to Slidshare here:

Oracle OpenWorld - A quick take on all 22 press releases of Day #1 - #3 from Holger Mueller

IBM Insight 2015 Spotlights Cloud Services, Spark, Watson Analytics Upgrades

Doug Henschen

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Doug Henschen is former Vice President and Principal Analyst where he focused on data-driven decision making. Henschen’s Data-to-Decisions research examines how organizations employ data analysis to reimagine their business models and gain a deeper understanding of their customers. Henschen's research acknowledges the fact that innovative applications of data analysis requires a multi-disciplinary approach starting with information and orchestration technologies, continuing through business intelligence, data-visualization, and analytics, and moving into NoSQL and big-data analysis, third-party data enrichment, and decision-management technologies. Insight-driven business models are of interest to the entire C-suite, but most particularly chief executive officers, chief digital officers,…...

IBM serves up data-analytic cloud services, an Apache Spark service on BlueMix, and new data-discovery capabilities within IBM Watson Analytics. As for that Cognos update? It’s a half step to self-service BI.

IBM’s announcements its IBM Insight 2015 event this week in Las Vegas weren’t all about cloud, but those were the ones I found to be the most interesting during an opening-day keynote otherwise focused on highlighting recent accomplishments and “Insight economy” vision statements.

The three cloud announcements that caught my attention concerned:

Insight Cloud Services and Industry Analytics Solutions
IBM Analytics on Apache Spark
New Q&A and data-discovery capabilities within the IBM Watson Analytics cloud app.

Here’s a quick rundown on what I liked and why.

IBM Insight Cloud Services combine data and contextual analysis aimed at delivering actionable insights.

Insight Cloud Services

IBM announced a set of data and analysis services aimed at bringing contextual insight to next-generation web and mobile apps. The data is from partners Twitter and The Weather Company and more than 150 other sources including public sources such as the U.S. Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics. The deep analytics draw on APIs borrowed from IBM Watson and include data-analysis and language-processing capabilities such as entity extraction, which is used to spots people, places, things and events within textual data. [Note: The day after this post, "IBM announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire The Weather Company’s B2B, mobile and cloud-based web properties, including WSI, weather.com, Weather Underground and The Weather Company brand. The Weather Channel (TV business) will not be acquired by IBM, but will license weather forecast data and analytics from IBM.]

The portfolio will include some 20 services, and IBM has licensed a high-scale, high-speed data-delivery platform from The Weather Channel, which delivers mission-critical weather data to airlines, insurance companies, media outlets and many other industries. Running on Softlayer, the platform is described as robust and scalable with high availability.

As for the purpose of these services, the idea is to extract, integrate and markup data and then provide contextual analysis that brings meaning. Joel Cawley, the general manager of Insight Cloud Services, used the example of the simple weather data point of a 50-degree temperature reading. That’s not so remarkable unless you add the context that it’s 50 degrees in Boston in February, where it has been below freezing for the last three weeks straight. Or maybe it’s Miami in August, and temperatures haven’t dropped below 75 since May.

The emphasis with Insight Cloud Services is on delivering actionable information, according to Cawley. Weather data services, for example, could be used by utilities to forecast demand and predict service outages, by local governments to develop emergency plans, or by retailers to optimize inventories and increase sales.

IBM introduced industry-specific Insight Cloud Services last May, including IBM Demand Insights, used by retailers and others to understand the correlations between sales of specific products with weather, events, news, trends and social commentary. Customers Urban Outfitters and Costco presented here in Vegas. The IBM Market Insights service is used by consumer products and media companies to better understand customers based on likes and interests expressed in social media. This provides customer-segmentation data that can be used to improve targeted marketing efforts.

IBM also introduced a cloud-based Fan Insights Service for sports and entertainment firms. The Ottawa Senators hockey team is presenting here on how it plans to use the service. The service is aimed at predicting ticket sales and concession and staffing needs throughout the season as well as effective marketing strategies based on fan sentiment, behavioral trends and individual fan preferences.

MyPOV: These services sound compelling, though I’m a little sketchy on just how contextual data services translate into actionable insights. The temperature example (50 degrees in Boston versus Miami) makes sense and who doesn’t want actionable insight? But is this support-heavy approach — much like IBM’s joint mobile iOS apps with Apple – whereby supporting implementation services will be required to deliver actionable insights within applications? I’m hoping these services will be straightforward and easy to use for Web and mobile developers.

IBM Analytics on Apache Spark

Spark is, of course, the white-hot open source in-memory analytics framework that IBM promised it would back in a big way earlier this year. This managed Spark service on IBM BlueMix has been in the works for a few months. On Monday I sat in on a Spark panel that included early customers Climformatics and consulting firm SmarterData.

The service is said to include Spark Core as well as its SQL, Graph, R and MLLib machine-learning components. There’s also a Notebook user interface for accessing, loading and visualizing data with drag-and-drop functionality. The service accesses data from BlueMix cloud services including Cloudant, DashDB, Streams and the DataWorks data-transformation and cleansing service.

MyPOV: I’m a big fan of Spark for its in-memory performance and analytic versatility, and this new service is early proof that IBM is following through on its commitment to develop Spark for the enterprise. IBM’s new service gives developers a much-needed option (besides Databricks) for learning and deploying Spark-based applications in the cloud. It runs stand-alone on cloud storage in IBM’s cloud, with no requirement to also run Hadoop (which should make things easier). It’s a pay-as-you-go, big data service that’s ripe for the times.

IBM Watson Analytics and Cognos

IBM Watson Analytics is IBM’s intuitive, cloud-based app with natural-language question-and-answer capabilities and smart, automated recommendation for visualization and analysis. Cognos is, well, the aging business intelligence suite born in an earlier era, but IBM has announced a significant facelift.

A lot of the sexy stuff inside IBM Watson Analytics was actually developed by the Cognos and SPSS teams, but IBM decided to add a dollop of Watson and serve it up as an independent, cloud-based product. Watson Analytics even has self-service predictive analytics capabilities, which I detailed in this report.

The “what’s new” in this IBM Watson Analytics refresh includes a new Expert Storybooks feature for data discovery. Developed in collaboration with nearly a dozen partners, Storybooks help users spot the most relevant facts, patterns and exceptions in data. A Deloitte-developed Storybook, for example, measures the effectiveness of incentive programs, while one from The Weather Company helps users understand how weather impacts revenue trends. IBM also introduced a Secure Gateway for Watson Analytics for accessing on-premises data. And it added connectors for DB2, Informix, Netezza, IBM SQL Database, IBM dashDB and a variety of popular third-party data sources.

As for the latest upgrade of Cognos, IBM introduced an extensive user-interface refresh aimed at consolidating overlapping functionality and bringing self-service capabilities to report and dashboard consumers and creators. It also introduced “Intent-Driven Modeling” that interprets what you are after based on search terms. Unfortunately, the deeper you go, the more you see all the complexity of the underlying product. And IBM has done little to streamline administration and the heavier aspects of data-management.

MyPOV: IBM calls Watson Analytics its tool for citizen data scientists (going after Tableau) while Cognos Analytics is, well, the legacy product. I can see where existing Cognos customers will appreciate all the self-service improvements in this upgrade, so maybe it will stem the rate of attrition. But I wouldn’t expect a flood of new customers.

Watson Analytics looks like the future for IBM, but it’s up against Tableau, Qlik, and a host of new and revamped cloud options from the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle and Salesforce. It’s notable that Amazon is addressing the complexity of data analysis starting with the back-end data layer with its recently announced Quick Sight service. That service is obviously far from proven, but it just may be that simplicity and ease of use has to start with core data management.

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For a safer internet, replace identity with attributes

Steve Wilson

Former Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

On one of the IDAM industry mail lists recently, a contributer noted in passing that:

"I replaced 'identity' throughout the document with 'attribute' and barring a few grammar issues everything still works."

We're getting warm.

Ok, so seriously, when will identity engineers come round and do just that: dispense with the word "identity"? We don't need to change our job descriptions or re-badge the whole "identity management" sector but I do believe we need to stop saying things like "federate identity" or "provide identity".

The writing has been on the wall for some time.

As Andrew Nash, CEO of Confyrm Inc. said at the Cloud Identity Summit in 2014, "attributes are more interesting than identity". The same goes for relationships: witness the Identity Relationship Management (IRM) movement.
The leading IDAM industry body, the FIDO Alliance, is conspicuously not/i> doing identity but only authentication (of attributes).
An identity stack is emerging where relationships and abstract identities are layered on top of concrete attributes and signals.
The problem we're trying to solve is shifting sharply from "Who are you?" to "What are you?".
I've been advocating that we drop down a level and try federating attributes instead.

"Identity" is actually a macro for how a Relying Party (RP) knows each of its Subject. Identification is the process by which an RP is satisfied it knows enough about a Subject -- a customer, a trading partner, an employee and so on -- that it can deal with that Subject with acceptable residual risk. Identification is just the surface of the relationship between Subject and RP. The risks of misidentification are ultimately borne by the RP -- even if they can be mitigated to some extent through contracts with third parties that have helped the RP establish identity.

The most interesting work in IDAM (especially the "Vectors of Trust" or VoT, initiated by Justin Richer) is now about better management of the diverse and context-dependent signals, claims and/or attributes that go into a multivariate authentication decision. And that reminds me of the good old APEC definition of authentication -- "the means by which a receiver of an electronic transaction or message makes a decision to accept or reject that transaction or message" -- which notably made no mention of identity at all!

We really should now go the whole way and replace "identity" with "attributes". In particular, we should realise there are no "Identity Providers" -- they're all just Attribute Providers. No third party ever actually "provides" a Subject with their identity; that was a naive industrial sort of metaphor that reduces identity to a commodity, able to be bought and sold. It is always the Relying Party that "identifies" a Subject for their (the RP's) purposes. And therefore it is the Relying Party that bestows identity.

The mangled notion of "Identity Provider" seems to me to have contaminated IDAM models for a decade. Just think how much easier it would be to get banks, DMVs, social networks, professional associations, employers and the rest to set up modest Attribute Providers instead of grandiose and monopolistic Identity Providers!

As Yubico CEO Stina Ehrensvard says, "any organization that has tried to own and control online identity has failed".

There's a simple reason for that: identity is not what we thought it was. As we are beginning to see, if we did a global replace of "identity" with "attribute", all our technical works would still make sense. The name change is not mere word-smithing, for the semantics matter. By using the proper name for what we are federating, we will come a lot closer to the practical truth of the identity management problem, and after reframing the way we talk about the problems, we will solve them.

Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity Distillation Aftershots Tech Optimization Future of Work Security Zero Trust Chief Information Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Privacy Officer

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Guerrilla Email Marketing

Russell Scibetti

Founding Editor, The Business of Sports
The Business of Sports

My name is Russell Scibetti and I have an extensive background in sports business, including CRM and database marketing, interactive and digital marketing, social media, corporate sponsorships and activation, and applied market research. From 2007 to 2014, I worked for Arizona State Athletics, Comcast-Spectacor (Philadelphia Flyers) and the New York Jets to manage and implement CRM, database marketing, market research and other technology-based sales and marketing initiatives. In 2014, I joined KORE Software as their VP of Product Strategy, where I am responsible for the strategic vision, planning and development of the KORE ProSports Ticketing, Sponsorship and Suites/Premium software products. I earned my MBA in Sports Business from the W.P. Carey…...

If a non-partner brand were to stand outside Citi Field before a World Series game giving away free products to fans, you better believe that their security staff would immediately escort them off the premises. This type of “guerrilla marketing” can often happen around major sporting events and always presents a challenge to the property to enforce.

Well earlier today, I received the following email from California Pizza Kitchen with the subject line “Kids Eat Free On Game Days!” When I opened the email, it features the promotion “In Honor of the Mets, Kids Eat Free” where kids can get a free meal with the purchase of an adult meal.

CPK Mets Email

So what do you think of this tactic? From the brand’s perspective, they technically aren’t doing anything wrong. They aren’t using team marks and don’t claim to be an official sponsor of the Mets, but they are definitely trying to use the team’s success to drive sales, which could be quite effective with the Mets Fever going around the NY metro area.

From the team’s perspective, they can’t simply escort the non-partner off the premises, since this is purely in the digital space. The brand doesn’t appear to be violating any rules, so a cease and desist is probably overkill. Maybe this could provide the team an opportunity to explore a future partnership with CPK. Clearly they see value in using the Mets to drive fans to their restaurants, so imagine how much more effective it could be as an official partner with the backing of the team.

Marketing Transformation Chief Customer Officer

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Framework For a Discussion of Cloud Computing (In Less Than One Page)

For a little over a year Sameer Patel (a good friend, except for this instance) has been bugging me about defining the cloud in a one-pager.

I have to say, it’s been challenging. I have written before pages and pages defining the cloud (including my cloud purist e-book – check it out) in many ways. I have done charts and slides, entire presentations, reams for electronic paper, and more – but defining it in one page was proving nearly impossible.

Until yesterday.

I finally figured out what the problem has been. It is not a problem of definitions (there are plenty of those going around) but a problem of confusion.

There is a general confusion as to what the cloud is because we use the same word to define three very different things.

The cloud as the Internet. In the old TV commercials that Microsoft sponsored five years ago so support the launch of Windows 7 we used to hear the battle cry “to the cloud” as if it was a place where everything magic happens and exists. They, of course, meant the Internet (actually, to be more precise the WWW – the subset of the Internet that we operate via browsers). Movies, data, applications – everything was “in the cloud” – meaning available via a browser from anywhere you could connect to the world wide web. Needless to say, this is an improper use of the term (I covered a myriad of definitions in my e-book, including the “standard” NIST definition that most people use).
The cloud as a delivery model. This improper definition led to the start of the confusion since it led to the wrong use of the term “cloud” by vendors when offered hosted and SaaS-like solutions. Ever since the days of ASP (if you remember that far back) and NetScape Application Server (NAS – again, if you remember that far back) we had applications that could be delivered via a browser. RightNow Technologies and Salesforce.com were pioneers in this movement allowing customers to use applications they ran in a data center in a timeshare model (let’s call it what it is – even if we don’t have mainframes). This was the way out of the dark ages of client-server architectures and the beginning of embracing the internet in organizations. The main problem this model has (still today) is that it shares a monolithic server running in a data center instead of leveraging the power of cloud computing architecture (distributed computing, more on this later).
The cloud as a computing architecture. Research on distributed work (later computing) models began in 1939 with earlier models of what became Cloud Computing Architecture. In this model, each job to be done is divided into smaller possible computational pieces (operational before computers) and distributed to the best resources able to complete them timely. This was done all at the same time – versus the serial manufacturing model prevalent at the time (that was spawned by the industrial revolution). Granted, it was impossible to implement in the early days but we have come a long-way since the start of computers and the growth of computing power to the point that we can have a three-tier architecture that supports distributed computing well today.

The above definitions are where vendors (especially Enterprise Software) vendors are stuck (a combination of one and two above) versus where customers want to go (three above).

And the source of the confusion.

I will build the above into a one page, downloadable infographic in the next couple of weeks (be careful what you ask for Sameer :)). But I wanted to get the conversation going in the right direction.

No definitions, just a way to recognize what each vendor is doing – and a post I will point to as I begin to evaluate where each major vendor is, and where they are going, in the next few weeks.

What do you think? Am I off?

disclaimer: even though I don’t mention any vendors here, some of the major vendors are my clients – some are not. I will disclose those more as I move forward – but I want to use this little piece of writing to thank Mike Fauscette, Paul Greenberg, and Denis Pombriant for helping me solidify my thinking. Any interesting or good insight above came from them, any major errors are totally mine and I did not let them talk me out of them. and for the record, the definitions above are 467 words without good editing done – under a page… :). more on this will be coming soon, be patient… but this is critical to frame the conversation of what the cloud is and is not.

Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization SaaS PaaS IaaS Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service Chief Customer Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Executive Officer

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Oracle CEO Mark Hurd's OpenWorld Keynote: Highlights and Analysis

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation

Chris Kanaracus is managing editor of Constellation Insights.  Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members.  Prior to joining Constellation, Kanaracus spent seven years covering the enterprise software industry for IDG News Service, where he frequently broke exclusive stories with a focus on end-customer issues. Kanaracus has also held various managerial and reporting roles at newspapers in New England since 1998. Twitter: @chriskanaracus , Title: Big IdeasConstellation Insights Insights delivers exclusive, daily analysis of breaking news across Constellation’s eight business research themes to Constellation Executive Network members. ...

Oracle CEO Mark Hurd’s OpenWorld keynote on Monday featured the expected heavy sales pitches and claims of Oracle’s leadership in the cloud, but also provided some bold predictions and interesting perspectives from large customers. Here’s a look at some of the highlights.

The 2025 Vision

Hurd listed five things Oracle believes will be true by 2025:

1. Eighty percent of production apps will be in deployed in the cloud.

2. Two suite providers will own 80 percent of the SaaS market. Only 20 percent of the SaaS market will be held by point providers.

3. All new testing and development will be done in the cloud. Today, 30 to 40 percent of IT spending is on these areas, making them attractive cloud targets thanks to cost savings, according to Hurd.

4. By 2025, virtually all enterprise data will be stored in clouds. The rationales: Better economics, easier access and real-time availability, Hurd said.

5. To that end, enterprise clouds will be the most secure environments in the world. Oracle’s is more secure than anyone, he claimed.

POV: Hurd’s prediction regarding dev and test is the easiest one to agree with, since that segment is fairly mature already with options from many vendors, large and small.

As for a SaaS market dominated by two suite companies, such a scenario probably depends on a lot of consolidation between now and 2025. One key factor for customers would be how well each vendor integrates and harmonizes the pieces into their suites.

Finally, Hurd didn’t spend a lot of time on the data and security predictions, but both topics will be up for deeper discussion on Tuesday during CTO Larry Ellison’s second OpenWorld keynote.

General Electric's Journey to the Cloud

Hurd’s keynote featured discussions with high-profile customers, including General Electric CIO Jim Fowler. GE is undergoing a far-reaching move to the cloud as part of a transition into digital lines of business.

Fowler provided a succinct and telling example of the cloud’s multiple benefits. One GE division moved a configurator application off-premises to the cloud and in doing so, the cost to run it went from $65,000 to $6,000. But the real benefits were global scale and the resulting ability to push more orders and quotes through the system, he said.

GE is taking a deliberate approach to what it buys in the cloud, which includes Oracle’s Taleo recruitment software, according to Fowler. “I want to buy things that don’t differentiate me in the market,” he says. It makes more sense to buy those products from specialists like Oracle, and use in-house talent to build out unique IP, Fowler said.

POV: Just a few weeks ago, Fowler appeared at Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent conference and declared the company “all in” with AWS as part of a far-reaching digital transformation.

GE is planning to move 9,000 application workloads to AWS over the next few years, reducing its data center footprint from 34 to four.

This subject unsurprisingly didn’t come up during Hurd’s discussion with Fowler. Oracle is touting its ability to offer customers the cloud at all three levels—IaaS, PaaS and SaaS—but it’s got some catching up to do, particularly in the first category. The good news for customers considering both options is that Ellison has publicly stated Oracle will compete aggressively with Amazon on IaaS pricing.

CONSTELLATION INSIGHTS
Constellation Insights provides members with daily analysis of breaking news across the enterprise. Insights will be available in November 2015. Learn more about Constellation Insights.

Data to Decisions Future of Work Tech Optimization Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief People Officer Chief Information Officer

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Oracle OpenWorld: 3 Takeaways from Day 1 Keynote

Holger Mueller

Vice President and Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

We have the opportunity to attend Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco, happening this week.

So take a peek:

If you can't watch here are the Top 3 Takeaways:

Here is why they matter:

6 Cloud Qualities - It is good to see Oracle define which qualities it applies to its cloud offerings - no surprises there - usual Oracle qualities - but good and key for customers to know what they are and to be able to measure future offerings with it.
New SaaS Capabilities - Good to see Oracle plugging the largest gap in the Cloud based suite with SCM. E-Commerce is a similar gap to address on the CRM side. The new HCM Learning, announced in spring 2015 becoming a cross suite capability is good move and to my knowledge a first in enterprise software. A great testament of how important Learning is in the 21st century.
Multitenant Java - Built on top of WebLogic - a key capability to scale Java better in both design and runtime, expect very good uptake, assuming it works.
BigData Discovery & Visualization Service - An area where Oracle has been traditionally weaker, good for Oracle customers and prospects to see Oracle add capabilities, very important in the overall race for the business user, with software providing much of the intelligence that is needed for completing these new tasks.

MyPOV

A good start for Oracle OpenWorld, with many more things to come, this was likely merely the appetizer. Too early to tell how well the overall integrated Oracle offering performs, we will keep watching.

Don't miss my overall OpenWorld preview here:

And here is the Storify I used for the video:

Oracle Softens Tone In Ongoing Hardware War with IBM

Chris Kanaracus

Managing Editor, Constellation Insights
Constellation

If Oracle and its executive chairman Larry Ellison have a favorite competitive target, it's IBM. The latest broadside—delivered in conjunction with Intel—is aimed at luring customers running Oracle database workloads on IBM Power7-based systems to Oracle's Exadata platform, which uses Intel Xeon processors.

From the release issued Sunday at Oracle OpenWorld:

The Exa Your Power program is a free database migration Proof of Concept (PoC) for qualified customers. Oracle will assess the customer’s environment, deliver a customized database migration results report, and show how they may be able to significantly reduce the time and cost required to run critical database workloads.

“CSC has successfully migrated dozens of customers’ enterprise workloads to Oracle Engineered Systems as a part of our Digital Transformation Services. We recently migrated an Oracle Database for a major insurance provider from IBM Power 7 to an Exadata X5 engineered system as a Proof of Concept,” said Ashish Mahadwar, Executive Vice President & General Manager, Emerging Business Group. “Our test results showed their Siebel Application running four-to-ten times faster and their ETL Processes running up to 12-times faster on the Exadata. The customer was very impressed by the scale of the benefits and the ease of migration and is now working with CSC on a major Exadata deployment.”

Oracle and Intel are jointly backing the migration effort.

Thousands of customers are now running Oracle databases on "large and costly" IBM machines, CEO Mark Hurd said during a keynote at OpenWorld on Sunday. "We think you can do better."

While the program was just announced, it's been going on in some form for a while. Oracle and Intel have already partnered to move more than 1,000 customers from Power7 systems to Exadata, according to a slide Hurd displayed during his talk. One named example was homebuilder Pulte Group, which saw financial application performance improve by a factor of 15, according to Oracle.

"It's sort of on us, Intel and Oracle, to give customers an easy way to see just what the two of us can do together to make life a whole lot better," Hurd said. "We can take some of these workloads and go 10 times, 15 times faster than the legacy system."

The Bottom Line

There's quite a bit to unpack here. First of all, the tone of the sales pitch is much milder than ones Oracle has made in the past against IBM over Exadata. In 2012, Oracle yanked newspaper ads that the National Advertising Board concluded had overreached in their Exadata performance claims over Power Systems.

Hurd carefully refrained from making overly broad claims in his keynote remarks, underscored by the reference to improvements for "some" but not all workloads.

In addition, there's the matter of making fair, apples-to-apples comparisons. Oracle's press release provides the example of a customer moving from a Power7-based system to an Exadata X5, which is the newest model. But the Power7 architecture dates to 2010 and was succeeded by Power8 last year.

Constellation Research VP and principal analyst Holger Mueller has a measured perspective on the announcement.

"'Engineered systems' such as Exadata are an area of competition right now, and vendors are trying to trump older architectures or form strong combinations," Mueller says. "Here we see that IBM used to implement a lot of Siebel turnkey systems on Power, and Oracle-Intel now want to go for a larger footprint with these customers. But databases remain sticky and the servers they run on are closely connected to that stickiness. Look at the perennial attempts of SAP to move its customers off Oracle, to very little success."

Tech Optimization Chief Information Officer

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Oracle Softens Tone In Ongoing Hardware War with IBM