Roundup Of Cloud Computing Online Courses

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Amazon Web Services, Coursera, Google, MIT Courseware and Microsoft are accelerating the depth and variety of cloud computing courses, courseware and learning materials they are freely making available online.

Over the last six months since the last Roundup Of Free Cloud Computing Online Courses, Amazon Web Services has added an additional series of free instructional videos, self-paced labs and selected free courses in the seven areas their AWS Training programs focus on. Microsoft’s Virtual Academy has grown to include more courses, training material and entire section of free downloadable books from Microsoft Press.  Google’s continual additions to the Developer Academy include online courses to learn more about Google AppEngine, Python App Engine and Google Cloud SQL.

Coursera and the University of Maryland, University of New Mexico and Vanderbilt University are all offering free courses on Android, mobile and web application development.  MIT Courseware continues to add useful courses across the broad spectrum of subjects they cover. The dominant theme of all courses is a new focus on creating and launching a new cloud computing application during the course.

Update on Cloud Computing Online Courses – Full Index Available For Download

One of the best indicators of how serious a software company is about their developer evangelism strategy is how much they invest in free training, easily accessible knowledge, and work to break down learning barriers.  Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft are each accelerating these areas quickly.  Each are choosing to freely provide valuable training videos, books and content in the hope of attracting and educating more developers.

In addition to these extensive evangelism efforts, there are several excellent courses and educational programs available entirely online at various price points.  You can find entire roundup of cloud computing online courses and programs here (in PDF) and also in Microsoft Word.

The following table compares the free cloud computing online courses.  Please click on the graphic to expand for easier reading.

Key Take-Aways:

• Coursera & the University of New Mexico are partner to offer the free course Web Application Architectures starting next month. By the end of this course, students will be able to design, develop and deploy a modern web application. You can find more information about the course here.

• DePaul University College of Computing and Digital Media is offering a Cloud Computing Technologies Program where students will build their own cloud applications.  Using Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft and Salesforce cloud platforms, students will learn how to create and manage cloud-based applications.  The eleven-week in-depth program in the principles, methods, and technologies of Cloud Computing. The program provides a broad understanding of the different leading Cloud Computing technologies.

• Stanford University is offering CS309A – Cloud Computing one of the most sought-after online courses in this field, from September 23^rd to December 16^th, 2014.  This class includes discussions with cloud computing industry leaders and CEOs who share their vision of the future of software-powered businesses.  Previous guest speakers include Hamish Brewer, CEO, JDA Software, Godfrey Sulliva, CEO, Splunk, Human Shah, CEO, RMS, Rob Bearden, CEO, Hortonworks, Bill Ruh, VP & Corporate Officer, GE Global Software and Aaron Levie, CEO, Box.   The course is taught by Timothy Chou, a widely recognized pioneer in cloud computing.  He has been teaching introductory computer architecture at Stanford for 15 years.  He has an extensive background in cloud computing and is a high energy, engaging speaker.   You can find his LinkedIn profile here.

New C-Suite 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

What Do You Like and Dislike About Mobile Computing

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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Love it or hate it, mobile computing is (has) dramatically changed the way we work. In my opinion, working mobile means more than just using phones and tablets, it's any time you're doing your job away from your standard office environment. Being mobile could mean using your laptop in your backyard or at a coffee shop. It could be virtual desktops shared from one machine to another, or via a kiosk. It could mean a screen in your car or in an airplane. It could be wearable technology like glasses, watches, or clothing. Dream big!

So I have two questions for you:

1) What are the 3 biggest advantages mobile access provides in helping you get your job done?

2) What are the 3 biggest challenges you have getting your job done while working mobile?

Your answers could be technical, cultural, financial, or anything else.

Sign in and leave a response, or tweet your answer to @alanlepo. 

Thank you for your replies.

New C-Suite Future of Work Next-Generation Customer Experience Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer

Customer loyalty goes beyond a plastic card in your clients’ wallets.

pending

Guy Courtin was formerly Vice President and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research covering Matrix Commerce and how the Internet of Things drives the evolution of commerce.  Guy has over 15 years experience in the technology space and specifically in the supply chain space. Most recently he was the Vice President of Research at SCM World. Where he focused on the service providers that empowered supply chains. Prior to SCM World, Guy held numerous senior positions. He was responsible for product marketing at RSi, a retail supply chain solution provider. There managed RSi’s go to market strategy around their leading cloud based supply chain solutions. He also spear headed Progress Software’s supply chain group. Where he was responsible for driving revenue and market share as well…...

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Customer loyalty is the holy grail for retailers, consumer product companies (CPG), airlines, credit cards, media, and so on and so on. Companies across the majority of industries are striving to understand why their consumers are willing to hand over their hard earned income for goods and services. Why or will these consumers continue to purchase from the same source? And how can these companies keep these customers coming back and hopefully spending more and more.

Companies have created and leveraged many creative means to gather and nurture information from their customers – whether it be loyalty cards you have at CVS or Shaws

grocery store or Vineyard Vines or Barnes & Nobles or Starbucks. These vendors know that for the most part they need to give you something for you to give over some information – usually they give you discounts, early views of new product lines, reward points etc. Airlines, of course, were one of the first movers to give you what was a highly sought after reward for your business – miles and status. Hotel chains were quick to follow. Anyone who spends time on the road, knows how vital is it to have “status” on an airline. While it still doesn’t beat flying private…so I have been told…having that status can usually make the drag of travel a little more tolerable.

All this information has added fuel to these supply chains – an insight into the most profitable client and demand. A view into a data source that can potentially drive the most profitable and desirable side of the supply chain. But are our supply chains getting a less than complete picture of what is really happening?

Looking at our consumers’ buying patterns for just our products is far from a complete picture. Grocery chains and drug stores are very aware of this. They work with vendors like IRI, Neilson, Orchestro or RSi to get a more complete view of the consumer basket. These software vendors will aggregate data across a category or across an entire store or region. This allows a more complete view of what is truly happening. But is that enough? No. Not if our supply chains want to be even more finely tuned when it comes to servicing our clients.

The reality is that our supply chains are no linear and they do not exist in a vacuum. They are all intertwined. The way to make sure our customers stays loyal to our supply chains is to understand how the interact with all the supply chains that are connected. This type of visibility cannot occur if we are only looking at that data that comes in from the loyalty program specific to my business. I need to understand how that customer interacts with tangential goods, potential substitute goods, services and even items that might not appear to be in the same cohort.

Companies need to step away from the loyalty card table…okay they still need to take in and leverage that information. But the data that needs to be added to the supply chain is information of how consumers behave when they are not giving you their information – meaning when they are doing other things with their time and money. Credit card companies have a leg up on this, they already have all that data. Smart supply chains will find ways to get access to that information. Just think about how much wiser your supply chain could be with true demand.

Matrix Commerce Next-Generation Customer Experience Sales Marketing Revenue & Growth Effectiveness Innovation & Product-led Growth Tech Optimization Data to Decisions B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience business Marketing eCommerce Supply Chain Growth Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP Leadership finance Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration M&A Enterprise Service AI Analytics Automation Machine Learning Generative AI Chief Customer Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Growth Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Product Officer Chief Revenue Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer

People, Places and Things

Alan Lepofsky

Vice President & Principal Analyst
Constellation Research

Alan Lepofsky - VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. With almost two decades of experience in the collaboration software industry, Lepofsky helps organizations improve the way their employees work together to get their jobs done. Lepofsky’s primary research area The Future of Work, focuses on: integrating collaboration and business processes (Purposeful Collaboration), structuring work via Social Task Management, leveraging analytics and digital assistants to work more productively, the strategic impact of mobile computing on business transformation, and measuring workforce culture based on Digital Proficiency instead of age. Twitter: @alanlepoLinkedIn: https://ca.linkedin.com/in/alanlepo     , Title: Big IdeasIntelligent Collaboration: The Intersection of…...

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Everything old is new again...

In response to my Tweet

I find it amazing how many of the 2014 business goals for #socbiz are the exact same as the 1995 goals of the early Lotus Notes days.

- Alan Lepofsky (@alanlepo) July 31, 2014

Joel Demay pointed out to me that Facebook's Graph Search helps you search for people, places and things...



Which was the main focus of Lotus's ~1999-2002 Knowledge Management efforts. "People, Places & Things as the three essential ingredients of an effective Knowledge Management infrastructure"
I especially like how together they support relationships and community, all within the context of what you're working on.

Sound familiar?




 

New C-Suite Marketing Transformation Future of Work Sales Marketing Innovation & Product-led Growth Next-Generation Customer Experience Digital Safety, Privacy & Cybersecurity X meta Marketing B2B B2C CX Customer Experience EX Employee Experience AI ML Generative AI Analytics Automation Cloud Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Growth eCommerce Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps Social Customer Service Content Management Collaboration Chief Customer Officer Chief Digital Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Human Resources Officer

Tiempo Speeds Pay and Motivation

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

Terri Griffith holds the Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. She spent two decades in the Silicon Valley and, in 2012 was honored as a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Terri helps her students and their organizations accelerate performance and prepare for the futures of work. Through her speaking, writing, teaching, and research, she brings evidence-based leadership and innovation to high-tech, education, and global agribusiness organizations. She inspires and coaches groups on negotiating change and uniquely mixing existing and new capabilities. Her most recent work uses a “bottom-up” approach to automation, including artificial intelligence. Her award-winning book, The…...

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Update: Aug, 12, 2014: After writing this post, I was invited to invest in Tiempo. I've accepted the opportunity and any future posts will include the disclaimer that I have a stake in the business.

The data entry portion of time-tracking generally isn’t value-added time in our work. In my #SummerOfWorkDesign, I’m interested in finding tools and tricks that help people focus on their work, and not the transaction costs of that work. Y Combinator participant, Tiempo, and other new approaches to time-tracking help speed up pay processes, accounting, and even personal monitoring.

Tiempo co-founder and CEO, Tad Milbourn, is an entrepreneur and intrapreneur I’ve been following for a while. (His Intuit Brainstorm project is the focus of the last chapter of my book, The Plugged-In Manager: Get in Tune with Your People, Technology, and Organization to Thrive.) With Tiempo, Tad and his co-founders (all Intuit alumni), Kyle Kilat and Peter Terrill, take Intuit’s focus on helping people manage their finances and run small businesses and extends it to the time-tracking process -- and integrates it with the Intuit suite -- with more integrations to follow.

Tad recently described Tiempo’s approach to me:

We're trying to create a world where service businesses can get paid instantly for the work they do. No more waiting to track time, waiting to create invoices, and waiting to get paid. Our first invoices that we processed were paid in an hour!

Motivation

This isn’t just about cash flow. It’s also about motivation and engagement. Yes, I hope we all work at something we have a passion for -- feedback from the work itself is a great motivator (and one of the levers of work design I mentioned in an earlier post). However, motivation comes from a combination of outcomes and the tighter all the outcomes, including pay, are tied to the work, the better the motivation. Economists and management faculty alike will agree on that one.

In Tiempo, pay is the focus, but there is also a “Kudos” button you can click on as you are approving the time someone entered. Tiempo user, Joseph Graves of Workshed says, "Even though my coworker and I work so closely together (literally sitting next to each other), it's a good reminder for me to give praise for a job well done."

Tiempo has competition, which signals to me that other people see the need to take the friction out of this piece of our work design. No more watching my friends scramble as they realize they are about to miss their timecard deadline -- and no more having to listen to them grumble about what a waste of time it is.

Do you have a suggestion for my #SummerOfWorkDesign? A tool or trick that helps you or your organization do better at designing work that is valuable, provides feedback from the tasks themselves, and helps you get the collaboration you need?

New C-Suite Future of Work Chief Customer Officer Chief People Officer Chief Digital Officer

Your employees shouldn’t be your users

Brian Katz

fill

Brian Katz is a director at pharmaceutical company Sanofi, where he manages mobile initiatives, including mobilizing the salesforce, building best practices for developing apps, handling BYOD initiatives, enabling new devices and form factors for success, and looking at ways to innovate in the mobile space for Sanofi. He started his career working with a multi-national New York financial company as an email architect, designing and maintaining their email and communications systems, which also involved supporting their mobile computing platforms. ...

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Whenever people talk about creating apps the conversation turns to delighting the customer. Companies build apps that will delight people. They will have a great user interface (UI) and an even better user experience (UX). They will enable people to do what they want/need to do. We learn from day one when you walk into a company it’s all about pleasing the customer. That’s why we build consumer apps the way that we do. Then when we have time, we build apps for our employees. You know, the ones we call users. We give them mobile devices or expect them to use their own. We take apps that exist on the desktop and port them to mobile devices. If we have time we may even try and make the apps look good. Yet businesses have no idea why their employees aren’t using those apps.

It’s really very simple. We think of our employees as an afterthought. We want to “do the things we’ve always done.” (I can’t count the number of times I have heard that excuse used!) We spend lots of time building backends that we hardcode (why use a FQDN etc. when our servers would never change?) into monolithic applications for the PC. The business would come up with a set of requirements, the scope would creep, and before you knew it, you had a crapplication that would never disappear. It guaranteed your developers a job because no one else could figure out how it was put together in the first place.

The problem is, your employees don’t want to use these crapplications on their mobile devices. They‘ve been conditioned by Apple and Google that apps should be simple and easy to use. They use consumer apps on their own mobile devices all the time. They don’t understand why work apps have to suck.

Quite simply, it’s time for companies to stop thinking of their workers as just employees and to start thinking of them as customers. They’re going to use apps to consume information and get stuff done, just like your external customers. Why treat them differently. The goal of any company is to enable their employees to get work done when and where they need to. The employees are going to take data, turn it into information and then knowledge. They then act on that knowledge. It may be as simple as taking a customer’s order in a retail store to the more complicated making a change on an assembly line. There’s no reason we have to make it so difficult with a crapplication.

Yet companies don’t like to think of their employees as customers. They forget that their brand starts with their employees. It’s hard to get other people to love your products if your own people don’t. When you treat your employees like customers, they communicate that brand love out. That’s what enablement is all about. Giving people the tools they need and getting out of their way so they can do a great job. When they love their job and their brand, everyone will know it.

This means that you have to follow the FUN principle. Focus on your users’ needs. Build apps that are designed for the devices that they have. Give them the ability to use their device and the apps to become the tools they need to get their job done. When done correctly, it’s no longer about the app or the device; it just becomes an experience for them.

This means throwing away the way you used to do things. You build your apps to meet your customers’ needs. You take their feedback and roll out updates. It’s no longer building an application and then walking away to the next project. An app never dies until you are ready to retire it. You use APIs to create standard connections to your backends to make sure that it’s easy to upgrade apps in the future and to extend functionality when you need it. The time to design and build an app is measured in weeks to a few months, not months to a few years. OS upgrades are easy to handle because you didn’t disband the app team, you knew you had to iterate. You no longer have external and internal facing app developers. You just have developers.

When the employee becomes your customer and you focus on enablement, you’ve truly taken your company mobile.

New C-Suite Chief Customer Officer

Work Design for All of Us: Location, Location, Location

Terri Griffith

Professor/Author/Speaker
Simon Fraser University

Terri Griffith holds the Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business. She spent two decades in the Silicon Valley and, in 2012 was honored as a Woman of Influence by the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Terri helps her students and their organizations accelerate performance and prepare for the futures of work. Through her speaking, writing, teaching, and research, she brings evidence-based leadership and innovation to high-tech, education, and global agribusiness organizations. She inspires and coaches groups on negotiating change and uniquely mixing existing and new capabilities. Her most recent work uses a “bottom-up” approach to automation, including artificial intelligence. Her award-winning book, The…...

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Where will people do their most effective work? I’m in the middle of selling my old house and just bought a new one, so the common real estate refrain, “location, location, location” has been going through my head a lot. Do people need to work at an organizational site to be engaged? Can they work effectively away from a formal office?

In my prior post, I said,

If more work is being done with fewer jobs ... the remaining jobs, and work in general, must be being done differently. What are the levers we can pull as we do this redesign? Who should be doing this redesign? These are the questions that everyone, from CEO to the newest freelancer, are -- or need to be -- grappling with.

I’ll be working on answers all summer, but today I’m taking on location with the first set of results from research I’m doing with Emma Nordbäck, John Sawyer, and Ron Rice.

The Study

We asked this question in the context of a northern European telecom company. Eight hundred thirty employees responded to our survey. Ninety-nine percent worked full-time for the company and ninety-seven percent had a standard employment contract. They’d been with the company an average of 17 years and largest age group of respondents was 41-50 years old. Perhaps not your standard picture of telecommuting superheros.

Does working away from the traditional office reduce engagement?

Not for this group. Neither was there a significant impact on how often they communicated with their supervisor, though even I expected that the people working away from the office would communicate less. I should have thought about who these people are. They work for a telecommunications company -- they are good with the tools and have been doing this a while.

Carlson and Zmud (1999) looked at how people deal with shifts from communicating face-to-face to using email, and we’ve expanding that thinking to include texting, mobile phones, and conference calls. They found that how well you communicate can depend on your experience with your co-workers, your tools, the organization, and your work. Given our telecom employees’ experience, they have the foundations for working effectively from afar, at least to the extent that it might otherwise affect their engagement with the work.

Next Steps

We have a new set of data just in from both this same company and a northern European travel provider. We expect that the telecom employees have more experience with the telecommunications tools that make up modern work communication, so we do expect to see location playing a role when we compare that company to the travel company. If it turns out that the travel company employees are more engaged when they are co-located with their colleagues, and if the telecom employees again don’t show a difference… then we’ll be able to make stronger suggestions about how best to design work given your particular base of workers’ experiences.

Even before those results come in, I do believe there is value in creating signals around coordination, knowing when someone needs help, or is best able to provide help. Different tools and practices may substitute for things we might miss if we are working from home, a coworking space, a plane, or a client’s office. It may also be that similar tools and practices can make us better connected even when we are co-located with our colleagues.

What tools and practices have you seen provide coordination and signalling value? Does “working out loud” (see this background from John Stepper, and this earlier one from Bryce Williams) fit in this category?

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Tekes and our universities for funding and other support.

Future of Work Chief Executive Officer Chief People Officer

SuperNova Award Deadline Extended

New deadline August 12, 2014 

You now have a few more days to complete your SuperNova Award application! The new deadline to apply for the only awards to honor leaders in disruptive technology is August 12, 2014. 

All finalists of the SuperNova Awards are awarded one complimentary ticket to Constellation's Connected Enterprise executive innovation summit.* The application takes only about five minutes to complete. Gather all the information about your fabulous disruptive technology project, and submit your application now!

Revised timeline

• August 1, 2014 August 12, 2014 last day for submissions.
• August 26, 2014 finalists announced and invited to Connected Enterprise.
• September 9, 2014 voting opens to the public
• September 30, 2014 polls close
• October 29, 2014 Winners announced, SuperNova Awards Gala Dinner at Connected Enterprise

We're searching for the rebels, catalysts, and innovators that are shaping the future of technology! If you led the implementation of a disruptive technology for your organization, we want to hear your story!

Complete the SuperNova Award application in 3 steps

*limit one per finalist. Transportation and lodging not included. 

Data to Decisions Future of Work Marketing Transformation Matrix Commerce New C-Suite Next-Generation Customer Experience Tech Optimization Innovation & Product-led Growth AR Executive Events AI ML Machine Learning LLMs Agentic AI Generative AI Robotics Analytics Automation Cloud SaaS PaaS IaaS Quantum Computing Digital Transformation Disruptive Technology Enterprise IT Enterprise Acceleration Enterprise Software Next Gen Apps IoT Blockchain CRM ERP CCaaS UCaaS Collaboration Enterprise Service developer Metaverse VR Healthcare Supply Chain Leadership Chief Digital Officer Chief Executive Officer Chief Financial Officer Chief Information Officer Chief Marketing Officer Chief People Officer Chief Procurement Officer Chief Supply Chain Officer Chief Technology Officer Chief Data Officer Chief Analytics Officer Chief Information Security Officer Chief Operating Officer

Google Enterprise – Not quite sweet enough to turn lemons to lemonade just yet.

Founder, capioIT
calitolIT

Phil is the founder of capioIT, a research analyst firm focussed on driving change in the analyst and research market through innovation and collaboration, with a strong focus on IT services and BPO strategies in the Asia/Pacific region. He has 17 years' experience in corporate strategy, consulting and market intelligence, gained in a diverse range of organisations and industries. Prior to founding capioIT, he established the Australian and Services business units at Springboard Research. Prior to Springboard Research, Phil was responsible for driving analyst firm IDC's research in the services marketplace across the Asia/Pacific region. During his 6 years at IDC, Phil led a large multi-national team of analysts across a range of IT related services with a particular focus on IT…...

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Last week Google held its customer event in Sydney, Atmosphere14. capioIT was intrigued to find that front and centre at the entrance was a bowl of lemons. I can only guess that Google was going to make lemonade from lemons, sadly, whilst the day had moments of sweetness, Google could not set up the lemonade stand this time around.

As an online consumer brand Google, only has Facebook and on a good day, Microsoft within range. The translation of this to the enterprise space, whilst successful on many other organisations benchmarks, has not been successful enough on a Google scale.
At the Australian event Google proved that it has a range of offerings that enterprises need, particularly in the collaboration and mapping/location space. The collaboration benefits of Google Docs are transformative, as is the ability to use location to drive improved outcomes for buyers and data for sellers.

At capioIT we believe that flaws sit in two key areas. The integration across the enterprise of Google is limited and the Google Compute offering is seriously lagging the other scale public cloud providers.

It was clear that Google enterprise cannot pinpoint an overarching and integrated core customer. They sell to a range of stakeholders, marketing, HR, technology etc, but there is no overriding core customer and limited integration across the client. Whilst it is a strong benefit to have such a diverse client base, if it is to be a truly transformational vendor for the enterprise it needs to fill the gaps, connect the dots, and offer and end to end capability

The Google Compute strategy is much weaker in the overall Asia Pacific region as well as ANZ. A data centre in Taiwan may be great from an ecological efficiency point of view, but it is not likely to interest too many customers in markets such as Singapore, Australia and India. As capioIT highlighted last week, Australia in particular is going to have a surplus of enterprise public cloud providers by year end – see As AWS dominates, Rackspace grows, and IBM, Microsoft and Cisco arrive by year end, does Australia need a sixth global IaaS provider . Despite being a much feared potential competitor in the IaaS market it needs to scale out much more quickly across the Asia Pacific market than it is doing to date. Organisations in key Asia Pacific markets such as China, Singapore, India, Japan and Australia are expecting their global providers to operate locally with in country presence.

Another point that highlighted the comparative lag of Google in the enterprise space was that the crowd was well below that of Amazon Web Services and salesforce at their customer events held in Australia this year. AWS and salesforce set the agenda; if Google wants to be a dominant provider then it must do the same.

Capture Point
Whilst at a product level Google has significant differentiation in the market it needs to do more to really challenge other enterprise providers as a top tier vendor. Integration across the product set and customer requirements is critical as is accelerated investment in cloud compute capabilities.

New C-Suite Future of Work

BlackBerry Security Summit, 29 July 2014

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…...

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Summary: BlackBerry is poised for a fresh and well differentiated play in the Internet of Things, with its combination of handset hardware security, its uniquely rated QNX operating system kernel, and its experience with the FIDO device authentication protocols.

To put it plainly, BlackBerry is not cool.

And neither is security.

But maybe two wrongs can make a right, in terms of a compelling story. BlackBerry's security story has always been strong, it's getting stronger, and it could save them.

Today I attended the BlackBerry Security Summit in New York City (Disclosure: my travel and accommodation were paid by BlackBerry). The event was announced very recently; none of my colleagues had heard of it. So what was the compelling need to put on a security show in New York? It turned out to be the 9:00am announcement that BlackBerry is acquiring the German voice security specialists Secusmart. BlackBerry and Secusmart have worked together for a long time; their stated aim is to put a real secure phone in the "hand of every President and every Chancellor".

Secusmart CEO Hans-Christoph Quelle is a forceful champion of voice security; in this age of evidently routine spying by state and competitors alike, there is enormous demand building for counter-surveillance in telephony and messaging. Secusmart is also responsible for the highly rated Micro SD cards that BlackBerry proudly use as removable security modules in their handsets. And this is where the SecuSmart tie-up really resonates for me. It comes hot on the heels of last week's Cloud Security Summit, where there was so much support for personal Hardware Security Modules (HSMs), be they Micro SD cards, USB keys, NFC Secure Elements, the good old "Trusted Platform Module" (TPM) or any number of proprietary chip sets.

Today's event also showcased BlackBerry's QNX division (acquired in 2010) and its secure operating system. CEO John Chen reckons that the software in 50% of connected cars runs on the QNX OS (and in high reliability settings like power stations, wind turbines and even gaming machines, the penetration is even higher). And so he is positioning BlackBerry as a major player in the Internet of Things.

We heard from QNX founder Dan Dodge about the elegance of their system. At just 100,000 lines of code, Dodge stressed that his team knows the software inside-out. There is not a single line of code in their OS that QNX did not write themselves. In contrast, such mastery is utterly impossible in the 15,000,000 lines that make up Linux or the estimated 50-70 million lines in Windows. It happens that I've recently lamented the parlous state of software quality and the need to return to first principles security. So I am on Dan Dodge's wavelength.

BlackBerry's security people had a little bit to say about identity as well, and apparently more's to come. For now, they are flagging that with 250 million customers in their messaging system, BBM represents "one of the biggest identity systems in the world". And as such the company does plan to "federate" it somehow. They reminded us at the same time of the BlackBerry Cloud slated for launch in December.

Going forward, the importance of strong, physical Two Factor Authentication for accessing the cloud is almost a given now. nd the smartphone is fast becoming the predominant access mechanism, so the combination of secure elements, handsets and high security infrastructure is potent.

There's a lot that BlackBerry is keeping close to its chest, but for me one extant piece of the IoT puzzle was conspicuously absent today: the role of the FIDO Alliance protocols. After all, BlackBerry has been a FIDO Board Member for a long time. It seems to me that FIDO's protocols for exchanging verified authentication signals and information about devices should be an important element of BlackBerry's play in both its software infrastructure and its devices.

In closing, I'll revisit the very first thing we heard at today's event. It was a video testimonial, telling us "If you need nuclear security, you need BlackBerry". As I said, security really isn't cool. Jazzing up the company's ability to deliver "nuclear" grade to demanding clients is actually not the right message. Security in the Internet of Things -- and therefore in everyday life -- may turn out to be just as important.

We basically know that nuclear power plants are inherently risky; we know that planes will occasionally fall out of the sky. Paradoxically, the community has a reasonable appetite for risk and failures in very complex systems like those. Individually and/or collectively we have decided we just can't live without electricity and travel and so we've come to settle on a roughly acceptable finite cost in terms of failures. But when the mundanities of life go digital, the tolerance of failure will drop. When our cars and thermostats and light switches are connected to the Internet, and when a bug or a script kiddie's stunt can soon send whole neighbourhoods into a spin, consumers won't stand for it.

So the very best security we can currently engineer is in fact going to be necessary at scale for smart appliances, wearables, connected homes, smart meters and networked cars. We need a different gauge for this type of security, and it's going to be very tough to engineer and deploy economically. But right now, with its deep understanding of dependable OS's and commitment to high quality device hardware, it seems to me BlackBerry has a head-start in the Internet of Things.

 

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