While  my New Year’s resolutions weren’t meant to be taken too seriously, I’ve seen several predictions that are indeed serious but to my mind, seriously wrong.  For example the prediction that Microsoft Office products are coming to the end of their life.   This claim is based on the notion that there is a wave of technologists whose lives revolve around twitter, facebook, gmail, tumblr, wordpress, etc, and for whom full-on office products are of no interest. I’ve previously admitted to an aversion to facebook (I disabled my account last week to avoid having to ignore further requests to befriend people) but I think I can set that disdain to one side and still judge the claim on its merits. Could I live without Word? – well sort-of, Wordpad would do until it came to customer documentation and other customer facing communications.  Could I live without PowerPoint?  No.  While PowerPoint is almost a byword for time-wasting meetings and boredom, there is still an almost daily requirement to communicate information in the “show and tell” format, and if not PowerPoint, then a wannabe PowerPoint is required.  Could I live without Excel?  No:  no-one in an operations or financial role can live without it.  In fact I make frequent use of it for sizing, estimating, analysing product performance, forecasting.  Can you do that with twitter or tumblr?  Of course not.  And lastly Outlook. Well it’s the centre of my world. Other email/calendar/task organiser products are available but they’re not as good.  If money was tight I might opt for open source alternatives but I really can’t see office apps disappearing in my working lifetime.

And lastly a little story that made me chuckle. I’ll leave out names just in case.  Large IT company holds its annual sales rally in one of the usual off-season resorts. Late night drinking ensues in various expensive places.  A younger less experienced guy is tagging along with the old hands and decides to order a round of mojitos at an eye-watering cost.  When he gets the bill he winces but says cheerfully “well at least I can expense it”.  He doesn’t realise he’s sitting next to the CFO who reaches across, takes the receipt, pops it in his mouth, chews, swallows and says “I don’t think so”.

Replify Accelerator 4. 1 ships next week – I’ll give an update on content shortly.

2 ) Facebook users will at last look around and say “Jeez, what am I doing – I don’t like most of these people, they’re really dull, often nasty, and I don’t need to spend my time in this hamster wheel. You know what, I’ll go get a life”

3 ) Apple fan-boys will realise that Steve Jobs didn’t invent anything, was a control-freak with both employees and customers, and has done for IT what Hollister have done for clothes i.e. make a profit from the herd instinct.

4 ) HP will manage to keep a CEO for an entire year.

5 ) Microsoft will come up with a mobile strategy that succeeds.

6 ) RIM, Nokia, Yahoo and Nortel will get in a car together and drive off a cliff a la Thelma and Louise.

7 ) Google will reveal that their motto had been mistyped and was actually “Don’t believe”, but that’s ok, we had stopped believing anyway.

8 ) IBM will buy Riverbed. No idea why, but someone has to.

9 ) The US patent office will grant someone a patent for “entering of information and control of a system by movements of devices controlled by the arms and fingers”, and that someone will sue everyone everywhere for infringement.

10) The recording industry association will hire King Canute to stamp out illegal downloads.

I shall of course review this list at the end of the year to see my score.

Two things to share with you:  One the official launch of Whisple - a consortium offering cloud services. Replify are a founding member and we
look forward to partnering with global vendors like EMC, and local specialists like Novosco and Anaeko, to enable local companies to embrace the cloud as both a marketplace and an enabler for their own businesses.

More information about the launch at the links below.

http://www.businesseye.co.uk/news/article/196-local-it-companies-lead-the-way-to-the/ http://syncni.com/news/5707   http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/business/business-news/broker-agency-helps-realise-potential-of-cloud-computing-16090810.html

Secondly, I’m a reader of Techmarketview’s daily analysis of UK IT news by Richard Holway.  He was commenting on the fact that, while he may look at goods in stores, even trying on clothes, ultimately he buys them all on-line. Snap.  Apart from groceries I can’t think of anything I’ve bought in a store in the last six months. I was particularly struck by this comment, which I hope Richard Holway doesn’t mind me reproducing, since I’ve no means of linking to it:

Frankly I think the trend is unstoppable. But maybe suppliers should accept the inevitable. Why shouldn’t high street stores become showrooms? Why shouldn’t suppliers actually pay those shops to display their goods – irrespective of whether they sell them?

Now that sounds to me like the answer to the question that has bothered me for quite a while. I love books, music and movies, and I love the shops that sell them and have many happy memories of browsing therein long ago when that was the only place to buy those things.  But now I’m a hypocrite – I don’t want them all to close (which they are surely doing) but I don’t give them my business – Amazon and eBay get it all.  So those stores need to evolve into something else.  By coincidence, George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company died yesterday (at the age of 98).  Shakespeare and Company is a bookshop in Paris, dating back over 50 years, and a legend to book lovers all over Europe.  Sure it sold books, but aspiring writers crashed there on cots, famous authors dropped in to give readings and people hung out drinking coffee.  Even if you prefer to consume your books on a kindle, you can’t walk past the place without dropping in to hear the mad jumble of books whisper to you. Such places create and reinforce a love of reading which in turn drives the sales of books in whatever form – but probably mostly bought on-line. Something needs to fund these real-world portals and Richard’s suggestion really resonates with me.

And lastly, I’m still smiling to myself every so often as I recall a recent email from an entity with which I was doing some non-Replify related business. I was asked to email them three copies of a signed contract. After laughing aloud, I was curious enough to see whether Outlook even allows you to do something as stupid as attach the same document three times. It does.  To be fair it’s possible that you could have three different files with the same name, but even so I would have expected some level of intelligence to be in play.  Oh well, at least if you’re running Replify, the file will only cross the network once. I elected to send one copy with the suggestion that it could printed as often as desired.

I was in meetings with some SharePoint users recently and reminded again of how, despite the great usability and flexibility of SharePoint in so many regards, it remains a painful experience to interact with it unless your on the same LAN.   Too much data is being moved around in an inefficient manner, and too much of the activity blocks a user from doing anything else while it’s going on.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Replify Syncstor users can link to SharePoint document (and other) libraries with a click of a button, and have that content cached on their PC and made available to them through the familiar Outlook user interface as another folder. Access to read, update or add new documents is instantaneous whether on the LAN,  on a constraint WAN connection, or totally disconnected.  All changes are propagated in both directions between the local cache and the SharePoint library, and activities like check-out and check-in can be handled automatically.

To show just how dramatically this improves the user experience I’ve created a little demo video.  I took the common use case of a user wanting to make a small update to a controlled document.    For a Replify Syncstor user, the entire process takes 20 seconds.  For a regular user, it’s 2 minutes and 40 seconds. That’s an incredible difference, and the poor user doesn’t really have the option to do anything else other than watch while the document is downloaded and opened, and then saved back to SharePoint.  Check it out.

So those that have to manage the real-world situation know that WAN Optimization is a life-saver.

So now you know what to ask Santa for:  Replify Accelerator and Replify Syncstor.

and btw, before you head to Best Buy, there is no such vacuum cleaner. But if there was, it would suck.

The overview discusses QoS and how, while it might be part of a solution,  it is not “the” solution. I think that on it’s own it’s more likely part of the problem – it encourages people to ignore the issue by further strangling the less critical data traffic to allow the vital traffic some oxygen. Personally I’m hoping that the industry is listening and we’ll slowly but surely see the problem addressed with updates to device firmware and new products being “right” to begin with.  Replify may make its money from selling a product to overcome network problems, but there are more fundamental reasons why long and/or thin connections deliver poor application performance, or rack up painful data transfer costs, and I’m happy to be focused on those problems and not the unintended collective consequences of poor design decisions by router vendors. So if you’re experiencing network issues, do of course invest in WAN Optimization (from Replify) but also take a look at whether you need upgrades to your devices to shrink their bloated buffers.

I think Gartner are likely right about de-duplication, and I’m linking it in my mind to Quantum’s presentation at IP Expo where they described their concept of enterprise-wide de-duplication, which, if I understood it right, revolves around a shared understanding of the cached data which avoids the need to re-hydrate content when sending it between any two systems within the organization.  Now to me, that sounds a little bit like our CLAN mechanism where the individual systems don’t all need to hold the cached blocks, only the block IDs along with the location of someone nearby (in network terms) who can provide it to them.  I’m intrigued and will try to find out more.

Firstly CLAN:  we already support what we call “static” CLANs; that is the ability to define a group of PC clients as part of a collaborative peer-to-peer network sharing cache content.  For this release we’re adding “dynamic CLANs”, which is the ability for CLAN enabled clients to spontaneously link to peers and share cached data wherever the bandwidth and latency makes that advantegeous. We’ve added full encryption of the stored data to ensure that joining a CLAN doesn’t make your data visible to those without the right to see it.  We’ve also added a CLAN cache such that data pulled from peer clients won’t displace any hot data of your own, and will only move into your own personal CLAN cache if and when you first make use of it.

Secondly Speed: we’ve undertaken an overhaul of our cache indexing and storage mechanisms and currently, strapped to our test bench, it has doubled the throughput. We’re pretty thrilled by that - we haven’t even got the most important new mechanism fully implemented yet, so there are further improvements to come.  We’ve also found more opportunities for the optimizations to be tuned to traffic type and traffic pattern.  More on that some other time.

There are, of course, other refinements and improvements but this is the main payload.

Replify 4.1 will be available early Q1 2012; think of it as something to cheer you up during the cold, wet, dreary months between the Christmas holidays and spring. Unless of course you don’t live in our crappy climate (and why would anyone with a choice).

We’re taking part in the TRAC wan optimization product survey again this year.  http://www.trac-research.com/wan-optimization It’s interesting that the first time we took part in this, and other WOC surveys, it was hard to answer the questions because the concept of a “virtual” WAN Optimization appliance wasn’t really catered for.  Not so any more – all the vendors have following us into virtual appliance territory and so the product analyses reflect that.  Of course CLAN is still hard to describe within the existing framework but we’re confident that within two years these surveys will include questions like “what’s your peer-to-peer capability?”

And btw, the image is a slightly modified Hay Clan crest.  My mother is a Hay, so I’m entitled to use it (…er, but probably not to modify it). The Hays were commoners until they assisted Robert the Bruce in winning a key battle, and as a result he enobled them and awarded them all the lands from where he stood, to where his falcon chose to land.  Fortunately it didn’t just fly around and land on his head or we would have been heard of no more.