Start-ups offer cool tools to ease IT's pain

If you want to know what IT tools and technologies you'll be using in a few years, it pays to keep an eye on enterprise research start-ups.

Sentiment echoed

That's a sentiment echoed by Maria Cirino, co-founder of venture capital firm .406 Ventures in Boston, who calls the move to cloud computing the biggest shift since client/server computing took hold in the '90s. "We see small to midsize companies embracing cloud on the spur of the moment, and large enterprises will shortly," she says, adding that companies stand to gain too much economic leverage to ignore the trend.

Cirino says she's been culling her stack of prospects to find companies that focus on securing the cloud, because she feels that's the biggest obstacle for larger enterprises. To illustrate, she's working with a pre-beta start-up called CloudCop that will provide monitoring and analytics for companies that want to move their data to the public cloud. She says that CloudCop aims to provide an audit trail for businesses facing compliance regulations.

Mobile is another key market for successful IT start-ups, says Tech Columbus' Indest. If a start-up looking for funding approaches him without a mobile component that addresses the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and other devices, he says, "it's just not a good prospect."

The past few years

For the past few years, IT departments have been pursuant to this agreement pressure to move from being a cost center to being a service provider for the enterprise. This means tracking business units' usage of IT resources, including labor, hardware, software, power and cooling.

CIOs and other IT managers often develop bills of services using a combination of spreadsheets, business intelligence software, asset management systems and, in part, blind estimates, according to Apptio co-founder, president and CEO Sunny Gupta.

"IT executives are trying to manage IT without any real way to measure costs, quality of service and the actual value of IT products. They have management tools to measure individual aspects of IT -- just as the network, bandwidth and mobile devices -- now not as a holistic view," he says.

Apptio's SaaS Research Business Management Solution Suite promises to give IT teams and corporate executives a consolidated look at all IT investments and their associated costs, showing the financial impact of client, infrastructure and application services, says Gupta. Authorized users can input data, run reports, view data via customized dashboards, or dispatch alerts based on predefined thresholds, just as a business unit's storage usage.

IT as well can create a "bill of IT" for each business unit to show its exact service consumption. Gupta says this is critical for forecasting, aligning budgets and developing an accurate chargeback program.

For instance, using the TBM, a company might realize that employees are using 10 applications that perform similar functions. By standardizing on one, it could gain significant cost efficiencies in terms of volume pricing and streamlined support. As well, the TBM offers what-if scenarios so organizations can weigh the pros and cons of granular business decisions, just as moving storage from the data center to the cloud or increasing the use of telepresence.

Mark Gibbs, CEO of Gibbs Universal Industries, a consultancy in Ventura, Calif., and a Network World columnist, says that as the data center becomes more complex, "IT resource tracking is as important as ever." Using SaaS offers benefits just as easily deployed add-ons and instant feature updates based on requests and what-ifs that other companies use, he says.

Enterprise Strategy Group senior analyst Lauren Whitehouse calls this issue the "Achilles' heel" for most organizations in this era of third-party hosted applications and cloud storage. "When IT owns and operates applications, they are responsible to make sure that the application and data are available, which includes employing backup/recovery processes and other high-availability innovation. But that more organizations are outsourcing applications, the issue of downtime and data loss is getting exposed," she says.

This is particularly a concern, she says, because many online service providers don't have then-defined service-level agreements. Whitehouse calls services like Backupify "an insurance policy."

Backupify is SaaS that backs up data from Basecamp, Facebook, Gmail, Google Docs, Twitter and other online applications to Amazon's S3 storage cloud network. "IT struggles because users are creating data in all these silos around the Web, and that data is exposed to hacking and viruses. It's as well prone to loss from human error," says Backupify CEO Rob May. By centralizing user data on Amazon's environment, IT managers can apply security and deduplication policies for compliance without building out their own storage infrastructure, he says.

One of the most immediate needs IT managers have today is controlling mobile devices in the enterprise. Tracking and securing lost and stolen mobile devices has been difficult for IT, however with many of these smartphones and tablets having access to corporate data, the ability to locate them, lock them down and erase them if they go missing is critical.

Device is registered with Track

Once a device is registered with Track and Protect, IT or a user can go to a personal, secure Web page to take steps to control and locate it if it has been lost or stolen. From that page, which can as well be accessed via mobile phone browsers, a user can send SMS-based commands to lock their phone, silence it so it doesn't attract attention, use GPS to locate it, or have the phone call another number and amplify the microphone so the user can hear the surroundings. To illustrate, the user might recognize a train station or children playing in a park.

Other options include remotely activating the phone's camera so the user can see the phone's location or take a picture of the thief, sending an SMS message to the phone announcing a reward for its safe return, and accessing the phone's history, including numbers dialed and data sent.

Track and Protect enables remote lockdown of the device based on personal preferences, just as three failed password attempts. IT or a user can remotely wipe a compromised phone, and the service can automatically grab and back up stored data from the phone previously it is wiped.

Harmsen says Track and Protect is different from its competitors in that it uses an encrypted SMS transport layer to carry out all these functions. Regardless of the device's platform, Track and Protect can interact with the phone, even if it's been turned off, the SIM card has been removed or the battery is low.

Track and Protect is available in 190 countries, including the U.S. The company is targeting countries where phone theft is prevalent, just as Russia, Brazil, China and Indonesia. "Say you were traveling abroad and lost your phone. You could go to an Internet cafe, log into your Track and Protect Web page, and locate it or secure the data," Harmsen says.

"Hosted mobile device management may offer an advantage when the hosted service can be accessed from the same public networks as these mobile devices," says EMA's Crawford. "This potentially improves the ability to reach and manage these devices wherever found."

Instead of building on-premises proofs of concept, innovation vendors using SaaS-based CloudShare Enterprise, just as Cisco, can provide IT teams with a URL where they can collaborate to build proofs of concept in the cloud. Using detailed specs from IT teams about their environment, vendors can create a working model of their product.

Then, IT and vendors can test-drive and tweak the product at the same time without having to disrupt the corporate network. CloudShare supports heterogenous and complex networked environments, and the user companies' own data and local on-premises systems can be integrated with the cloud environment, Kra-Oz says. "Clients can do everything they could using [CloudShare] as if the software were on-premises."

Julie Craig, innovation director at EMA, says cloud-based proofs of concept are highly beneficial for IT. "Companies that can do proof of concept in the cloud can save the consuming companies millions of dollars in hardware investments. They as well can provide the complex innovation engineering and related staff, which can be difficult to find," she says. And once the IT team at the customer company provisions its cloud-based environment, these resources are available to them anywhere, anytime, she adds.

Benefit for IT departments

Kra-Oz says this is not only a benefit for IT departments, nevertheless also for the vendors themselves, since they don't have to commit their best engineers to travel from site to site. Instead, they can work with several sales prospects from any location, which alleviates the wear and tear that comes with travel. "In other words than having to set up each site visit, the engineer can reuse parts of the network configurations," Kra-Oz says.

Proofs of concept are not the only use Kra-Oz sees for CloudShare. He says the environment is as well suitable for interactive training among distributed IT teams. To illustrate, if a company is installing a new ERP system, IT staff can use the cloud-based model to familiarize themselves with the software's features. This saves companies from having to fly in employees and carve out a part of the network for testing. CloudShare lets IT get to know the environment, get feedback from users, and identify potential problems previously products and their supporting infrastructures are purchased and brought on-site, Kra-Oz says.

As IT departments head deeper into 2011, many no doubt will be looking for new technologies that speed deployment cycles, help protect their current investments in mobile innovation, and avoid costly hardware and software investments. And that means cloud. Enterprise Strategy Group's 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, to illustrate, found that organizations in cost reduction/containment mode indicated a significant increase in their willingness to consider cloud computing services or SaaS as a way to control IT costs in 2011.