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BYOD and TCO

One reason enterprises are readily accepting BYOD is they see an opportunity to reduce the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of computing equipment. The thinking goes that if employees pay for their laptops, tablets, and smartphones themselves instead of using company equipment, the company saves a bundle in TCO. Of course that is not as straight forward as it may appear because the initial purchase cost of a piece of equipment is often only a small fraction of the TCO.

Nevertheless, BYOD does eliminate a large item from capital expenditures. Cloud also promises to reduce capital expenditure by shifting capital equipment purchases to operational cloud service fees. That is a true benefit, but it is still a paper transaction. Unlike cloud, BYOD capital savings is real money that will never have to be spent, not a shift from a capital column to an operational column. Operational expenses are generally easier to manage than capital expenses, but no expense is easiest of all.

And it gets better. If an employee dumps a can of coke on his company laptop at lunch, the company usually ends up paying for a replacement, but when the laptop belongs to the employee, the employee buys a replacement. The service desk and the IT department will not burn hours trying to revive the dead soldier and the IT department probably will not be responsible for reimaging a hard drive and restoring backups.

Put another way, traditional break/fix service is not the same in a BYOD environment, and service desks may someday completely drop that aspect of support. But hold it! A fellow employee in the office once inadvertently bumped over cup of coffee on my laptop. As I remember it, my productivity zeroed out for a few hours while IT services delivered a loaner to me and acquisitions expedited a replacement. If I had owned it and had to replace it myself, I would have been out of commission for at least a day while I shopped around for a good buy on a new laptop and worked on restoring the system as best I could. Not only that, I would have been a pretty grumpy employee, who might even think the company owed me for placing me in a laptop-destroying environment.

This leads to a question: what kind of enterprise support is needed in the BYOD age? What are the legitimate limits? A major clue comes from the way these devices are supported outside the enterprise now. We all know that iPhone and Android apps are supported differently than traditional software. Do service desks need to take a lesson from the app stores? I think so. I’ll talk about this more in a future post.

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BYOD Service Desk?

This week, thanks to my friend and technical reviewer, Efraim Moscovitch, I listened in on a webinar on service desk software designed to support Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) devices such as tablets, smartphones, and personal laptops. I was struck by how little has changed in the service desk realm in the last twenty years. When the ITIL books came out in the 90s, the big things in service desk design were support processes and integration with infrastructure management tools. In those days, we scrambled to support ITIL incident and problem management processes and to integrate with network management tools like Unicenter and Sun Net Manager. A blink of an eye later, we worried about moving the service desk interface closer to the analysts and users; in other words, browser based clients. Now, to support BYOD, developers are scrambling to support mobile device management tools, incident and problem management processes tailored to BYOD, and service desk apps for mobile devices. The wheel keeps turning.

This state of design and development both disappoints and encourages. It is disappointing because you would think that someone would come up with something really innovative in service desks instead of churning the same old ideas. It is about time.

But it is also encouraging. The innovations of the 90s successfully tamed the wild distributed system environment where mission critical servers sat under the receptionist’s desk and networks were cabled after hours by accountants and sales managers. The chaotic BYOD environment has similarities to the distributed system wilderness; tailoring traditional service desk tools to BYOD promises to be equally successful.

In working on my coming book on service management in the cloud era, I have been thinking a lot about service desk support for BYOD and I have developed some ideas about it. Service desk architects and managers may find them valuable. I hope to write about some of them here.

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The Death of Microsoft?

Is Steve Ballmer leaving?  Is Microsoft about to roll over and die? Are they already buried? Is Windows 8 an abject failure? The Surface a fiasco? Bing a joke? Are PCs and Windows obsolete?

I have no idea about the politics, pressures, or whims that made Ballmer leave. I am curious about his successor, but I guess we’ll all find out soon enough.

Death of the PC

The death of the PC is an exaggeration. Tablets and phones are popular and replace the PC for many people, but there still are content producers who want a fat keyboard and a couple of big displays. The PC market will undoubtedly continue to shrink, but it won’t disappear. One reason for the shrinkage is seldom mentioned: PC hardware is ahead of software. Except for gamers, last year’s laptop doesn’t cry out for replacement anymore. Have you noticed that W8 generally performs better than W7 on the same hardware? A new Windows release used to be Intel’s best sales rep. This round you get improved performance without a new box.

Microsoft Software

Microsoft just might have the right idea with W8 combining touchscreen with a traditional Windows style. After getting used to it, W8 is not so bad; I find it easy to overlook the clunky tiles to desktop transition, and I don’t miss the run menu. Microsoft has a long history of polishing up rough versions. Does anyone but me remember Word for DOS? Improvements in software interfaces are always painful. It is close to impossible to get everything right on the first try and true improvements look like bugs until you get used to them.

Although Microsoft has had some product failures in the last few years, they have also had some real successes. Office has improved enormously. Word documents with complex formats don’t do strange things nearly as often as they used to. I almost never edit with the format marks turned on, something I used to do by default to untangle the confused formatting. Outlook has largely quit screwing up my appointments. OneNote is a product that I initially passed on because I thought it was a toy. But after I started using it, I have it open all the time. I believe it is the best new product I have ever seen from Microsoft. These are improvements I respect.

Redmond Culture

Take this for what it is worth. Your mileage may vary. I’ve lived in and close to Redmond for many years, but I have never worked for Microsoft, though I have met with Microsoft engineers many times. I think something good has happened in the Microsoft culture. I used to avoid Microsoft people, a hard thing to do in Redmond, because they were just too full of Microsoft, but in the last decade, that has changed. Their culture has lost its arrogant edge and its professionalism has gone up. For some reason, I attribute the solid usability of the latest rounds of Microsoft software to that change.

Microsoft is in a tough spot. The PC and Windows market is changing fast and they will have to work hard to maintain their place. But I also think that with the right leadership they will be better prepared to face the head winds than they ever have been before.

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Open Virtual Format

Lately, a share of my time has been going into helping with the next release of OVF, the DMTF’s (Distributed Management Task Force) standard for packaging virtual appliances for deployment. The standard is vendor neutral, meaning that it is not “owned” by a single hypervisor provider. Instead, most hypervisor providers have participated in defining the standard. OVF was adopted as a US ANSI standard and then an ISO/IEC international standard several years ago. Version 2.0 and all other published versions are available for free on the DMTF OVF page. ISO/IEC charges for copies of their version, but the content is the same as the corresponding DMTF version.

What is OVF?

Although OVF comes up frequently in discussions, I am surprised at how few people know what it does and why it is important. Usually people think about virtual machines as an image of an installed physical computer that can be reproduced virtually by a hypervisor (more properly, a virtualization platform). That is correct as far as it goes, but the really interesting applications of virtualization involve many virtual machines installed with elaborate software that is all configured and wired up to work together. For anyone who has had the mixed pleasure of spending weeks installing and configuring a complex physical system, packaging up a complex configuration and reproducing it at will is close to a miracle.

Installing Complex Configurations

OVF shows its worth when installing complex configurations. The term “virtual appliance” refers to a simple or complex system packaged up and installable as a single appliance. Virtual appliances are what OVF is all about. By far the most notable application of OVF is packaging virtual appliances for cloud deployment. An OVF package consists of individual virtual machine images that can be in a range of formats, a security manifest for signing packages as authentic, and, most important, the OVF descriptor that describes how the images are intended to fit together. The descriptor is designed to be flexible and extensible, which means very complex systems can be described in as much, or as little, detail as needed to deploy as intended. Using OVF-packaged virtual appliances, deploying complex appliances on a cloud can be fast and dependable. No more errors from mis-typed URLs and cabling goofs!

The Challenges of Complication and Variation

One challenge faced by any packaging language is the staggering diversity of the systems that benefit from packaging as virtual appliances. How do you produce a machine readable description of anything so varied and complex?

Secret Weapon: Common Information Model

OVF uses the DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) for detailed descriptions. CIM is occasionally frustrating for its complexity, but it is a finely articulated and living model of IT management information developed by major IT vendors and published as an open standard by the DMTF. Its complexity reflects the complexity of the domain. It has been evolving for over ten years and continues to be added to. The latest version of CIM was released in January 2013.

OVF taps in to CIM for its rich model that is accessible as a public standard. Consequently, OVF descriptors can be interpreted by anyone, no matter what scheme they use for their internal representation of systems. Keep in mind that OVF does not impose CIM on anything but the terminology used in an OVF descriptor. By tapping into CIM, OVF takes advantage of CIM’s ready availability and its terminology for almost everything you can imagine in a data center. At the same time, the consumer of the OVF standard is not burdened with terminology that they may never use. The coupling between CIM and OVF is sufficiently loose that, for example, terms in CIM 3.0 can be used in an OVF 1.0 compliant package, even though OVF 1.0 was released years before CIM 3.0. The end result is a packaging description that is capable of great detail and reach, but remains comprehensible and usable.

The OVF standard is not the easiest standard to understand, but it has tremendous practical value and its value has been increasing with each release. As an international standard, it has wide exposure and growing acceptance. I expect that someday in the not-too-distant future, it will be recognized as a bedrock foundation for good cloud practice.

I’ve written more about OVF in my book Cloud Standards. I urge you to go there for more description of OVF and how it works.