Future world’s largest airport opens in Dubai

Dubai is battling on in its bid to become the world’s most important city, and we can tell you, its one heck of an exciting place to be at the moment. We’re particularly proud of serving clients in Dubai, like the good people at Dubai Bank, and of being part of the economic powerhouse that the emirate is becoming.

This weekend brought more exciting developments for Dubai. On Sunday, Dubai Airports opened what will become the world’s biggest airport; the Dubai World Central Al Maktoum International. At present, the airport is only running cargo operators, but there are big plans for Dubai’s second airport.

Sunday’s flights kicked off with three flights by Rus Aviation, Skyline and Aerospace Consortium, and there are already 13 other freight operators signed up for more flights. In phase one of the development of the new airport there are plans for a runway big enough to handle Airbus A380 super jumbos, 64 remote stands, one cargo terminal with the capacity for 250,000 tonnes of cargo annually, and a passenger terminal building capable of serving 5 million passengers per year.

That’s just for starters. Once the airport is finished, it will have five runways, four terminal buildings, and the capacity for 12 million tonnes of freight and 160 million passengers a year. The project will take $10.9 billion and 10 to 15 years of hard work, and passenger flights are expected to start at the end of March 2011.

With aviation accounting for a quarter of Dubai’s GDP, this is a huge leap in the right direction for the emirate. Additionally, it represents another move towards building Dubai up to become a global logistics hub. Here at Inatech, we’ll be watching as Dubai takes up more and more of the world stage as a major player.

Oracle Retail CrossTalk 2010: sharing insights and new innovations

Oracle Retail CrossTalk 2010 is nearly upon us. The conference takes place on 22nd-24th June, and will feature discussions of the role of technology in new retail business strategies.

For anyone working in the retail technology sector, this event can be a real eye-opener, so if you are not actually going, keep an eye out for the news coming out of the event. You can follow it pretty much anywhere; Deli.cio.us, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the Insight-Driven Retailing Blog.

Duncan Angove, general manager of Oracle Retail, will present a look at the future of retail as established and emerging brands redesign the customer experience and re-imagine opportunities for growth. He said: “Retailers that come to CrossTalk once come back year after year because of the caliber of peers they encounter and the discussions that ensue.

“This year, every aspect of the retail market has been redefined, and retailers will be talking about how to redesign the customer experience, imagine new opportunities for growth and create more value across their business environment."

Discussions between the top dogs at the biggest companies make great food for thought. For example, Google Product Director Sameer Samat, Buzzient CEO Tim Jones and Digby CEO Save Sikora will take part in a panel discussion called “Disruptive Technologies: Innovators Redefining Retail,” throwing out titibits of retail technology expertise right from the top.

There are plenty of other discussions, seminars and presentations going on too. Best Buy, Lowe's, Wet Seal, Aldo, Grupo Pao De Acucar, Sunrider International and other retailers from around the world will discuss how they are using technology to redesign the customer experience, enable international expansion, localize merchandise and optimize store and mobile-commerce operations.

Other topics for discussion include the impact of social and mobile commerce on merchandising, store operations and the supply chain, and new levers for growth in today’s retail environment.

Perhaps most fun of all will be the 2010 Oracle Retail Excellence Awards on Tuesday night. This ceremony with recognise the CIO of the Year, as well as providing awards for Redesigning the Customer Experience, Re-imagining Growth, and Re-invigorating Operational Excellence.

Oracle is no longer just a player

This week Intel, Oracle, BT and a number of other high-profile IT companies announced their backing of the Kantara Initiative, which aims to bring greater harmony to identity management.

The Initiative assesses ways of improving interoperability between different identity technologies and standards also addressing areas like privacy.

“Oracle’s acquisition of Sun has positioned Oracle in the identify management arena big time. Through the inclusion of Sun’s Identity Management products to Oracle’s existing IDM portfolio, Oracle now has to be seen as the market leader in this space. As such new partnerships and market dynamics are coming into play. Whereas before BT and Intel would not have partnered with Oracle, the acquisition strategy undertaken by Oracle over the past few years now sees them being the partner of choice in this space. Oracle is no longer a player with a bit of software – but a thought and market leader in the IDM space.” Simon Ellis, CTO, Inatech

Oracle’s BI Release 7.6.9 provide greater insight in business operations

Software giant announced Business Intelligence Applications Release 7.6.9 this month.

Commentators have leapt to analyse Oracle’s latest BI offering. Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson told ComputerWeekly that the real developments in BI now are in applications, with all core functions having been addressed by previous products.

He went on to say that small to medium sized businesses will be drawn to the pre-built tooling in applications like Loyalty Analytics that this release presents. These, Evelson said, assist small businesses in getting their software running as quickly as possible. “A customer might say, ‘We're a small bank, we know everything about banking, but not CRM. We're going to trust Oracle,’" Evelson said.

Inatech’s Simon Ellis gave his view on the new Oracle offering, first outlining the practical developments of the product.

“With this release Oracle further extends its out of the box reporting platform on top of their Enterprise suite of products. This release sees additional reporting dashboards added to HR and Finance. Oracle has also now extended its technology footprint to the JDEdwards Enterprise One Financial management platform to allow advance Financial Analytics.”

All of these new features mean that customers have more and better access to information than ever before, Ellis explained: “In practical terms it is now easier than ever for customers to gain insight into their business operations by leveraging pre-built analytics on their transactional ERP systems.

“It is now even easier for Oracle Specialist Inatech to enable this insight for customers, leading to a greater ROI and lower TCO through utilising Oracle’s pre-built solution,” he concluded.

IBM’s CloudBust may not be as innovative as it claims to be

IBM announced the release of its new offering, WebSphere CloudBurst, this month with much pomp and circumstance.

The new product allows firms to make use of “private” cloud computing, and, according to IBM, speed up the process of testing and then rolling out new business applications. IBM’s general manager for Application and Integration Middleware division Tom Rosamilia, explained the advantages of the product in details: “About a year ago we started talking with customers about where the pain points were around cloud, and this is the resulting product," he began.

"You're doing development or modelling on someone else's cloud and making use of their services. The usage cases will be those you're willing to allow outside your environment. With the private cloud, you're doing the same thing but inside your firewall.

“Traditionally you've had to provision for peak use so your servers can stand up. With CloudBurst, you can dispense images so you can quickly bring up capacity and bring it back down again," he concluded.

This all sounds cutting edge, but, according to Inatech’s Simon Ellis, it is an approach that has already been used at length before now. “IBM’s latest announcement is in my opinion a small evolutionary step for clients either currently using virtualisation or cloud solutions."

“IBM takes elements of both and allows IT departments to provide cloud services internally through the deployment of their appliance. However, most tech savvy organisations are already following this approach: using virtualisation for provisioning on demand in their datacentres. Adding the word ‘Cloud’ doesn’t mean it really is new, but is perhaps a re-branding or evolution of something that already exists today."

“The use of an appliance means that it may be easier for some customers to get started as they can effectively buy it off the shelf, but in essence it’s nothing that most vendors and savvy IT organisations can do today, potentially for less cost.”

Why businesses are failing to maximise on ERP

New research published this week by Accenture claims that at least a third of UK and US businesses are only using 62% capacity of enterprise resource planning systems.

This means, Accenture said, that companies are missing out on data-sharing benefits that could boost them to the next level of business. Jeremy Oates, UK head of systems integration and technology consultation at Accenture, said that the problem was partially due to outdated views of ERP.

"Part of the challenge is that organisations can take a traditional view of ERP and sometimes see such systems as monolithic and inflexible, rather than understanding that the more mature and agile software that exists today can enable companies not only to manage core business processes, but actively distinguish themselves from competitors," he said.

Other reasons for the lack of utilization of ERP arising from the survey were a lack of time to learn to use the technology, and a belief within businesses that they did not need to use it.

Inatech’s Simon Ellis highlighted costs and the ever-present specter of the recession as another reason for business’ failure to cash in on the technology. “In tough times organisations may reduce their spending on new systems, but ideally they should be sweating their existing assets,” Ellis explained.

“Some organisations have missed an opportunity in the past few months of gaining competitive advantage by leveraging their ERP systems to the fullest potential, either to improve the bottom line or gain greater agility for when we come out of the recession. Gaining greater insight into supply chains, costs etc can all reap real benefits. Is it a case of spending a little to save a lot?”

Some organisations, Ellis continued, simply do not take their investment of funds, time and attention far enough to truly gain from it: “Many organisations are just glad to see an ERP implementation over and in. The real benefits come by sweating their investment and gaining additional insight, which was almost always part of the original business case but can be often forgotten.”

Businesses sing praises of cloud computing regardless of challenges

Predictive analytics software producer SPSS has this week made its case for cloud computing at its user conference in Prague.

In an interview with Silicon.com, CEO Jack Noonan said: “The whole cloud thing is a terrific deployment opportunity for this kind of technology.

“The greatest thing that ever happened to SPSS was the web."

Noonan went on to explain that a service orientated architecture approach would be fundamental in allowing SPSS technology to improve the data businesses have access to for their CRM and ERP systems. Furthermore, the conference included many glowing references to cloud computing in terms of its possibilities for data predictions from SPSS clients.

Car manufacturer Fiat has been using SPSS PASW Modeler technology, and customer intelligence manager at Fiat Giovanni Lux claims this has increased customer retention by between six and seven percent.

Insurance group RSA’s analytics manager Simon Dudley said that RSA “bought into the whole vision of being a predictive enterprise,” and that RSA plans to expand their SPSS technology in future.

While cloud computing, and in turn, data prediction, have both created excitement in all IT sectors, the risks have not yet fully been explored, and so it seems short-sighted to leap into the cloud without waiting to see how the technology pans out.

Inatech’s Simon Ellis, CTO, said: “Cloud computing brings both benefits and challenges to both customers and infrastructure suppliers. For example, cloud computing allows organisations to size for environments only when they need them, saving massively on infrastructure spending and with cloud computing they can essentially get capacity on demand.

Ellis was as interested and enthusiastic as anyone else in the IT sector, but highlighted some reservations about the new technology.“At last the vision of real GRID computing can start to be realised; but not without another set of challenges,” he conceded.

“For example, how do organisations (both suppliers and clients) measure usage and licence compliance?”

Concluding, Ellis summed the prospects and problems of cloud computing up thus: “With new operating models come new operating challenges.”

Oracle to sabotage MySQL?

Since Oracle’s controversial acquisition of Sun, the fate of MySQL, an Oracle competitor, and indeed acquired technologies in general, have been debated back and forth around IT communities. Many are convinced that Oracle will do as much as possible to eradicate MySQL. This week, Monty Widenius, main author of MySQL, threw another cat amongst the pigeons by announcing that he will set up a database to consolidate work on MySQL.

Widenius’ new project, the Open Database Alliance, will be made up from companies that currently offer software, support and services for MariaDB, a branch of MySQL. Widenius said: "Our goal with the ODA is to provide a central clearing house for MySQL development, to encourage a true open development environment with community participation, and to ensure that MySQL code remains extremely high quality.

"Participating members at this stage will have a strong voice in how the organisation is structured, and we look forward to collaborating with anyone in the industry that provides or depends on MySQL."

Simon Ellis, Chief Technical Officer at Inatech, said that perhaps Oracle should avoid upsetting the open source community for the sake of market dominance: “The open source community has not taken well to Oracle’s ‘acquisition’ of MySQL.

“If Oracle has truly no intentions of changing the mysql roadmap, perhaps it should ‘sell it back’ to the open source community. “

That said, Ellis went on to comment that, given the circumstances, now could be the perfect time for users to switch from MySQL and enjoy potential advantages of the enterprise Oracle stack: “By now controlling MySQL gives Oracle a really strong position in the open source community and a fantastic opportunity to ‘migrate’ people onto the enterprise oracle stack via offering potentially tighter integration of tools and technologies.”

Users, however, may be more loyal to open source than Oracle have perhaps imagined. Ellis noted: “There is risk that MySQL code base will split, which will dilute Oracle’s position. This is a real tester to see how organisations that deem themselves ‘open source’ friendly deal with acquiring open source technology and interact with the open source community.

“By embracing open source there is a danger that your revenue streams become diluted and your brand messaging becomes confused.”

The development of MySQL under Oracle is likely to be a lengthy process, with the potential for casualties both within the open source community and for Oracle. As Ellis summed up, no amount of predictions can clarify MySQL’s future; “this one is not over by a long shot,” he mused.

Christmas in Bangalore

Inatech Bangalore celebrated Christmas in its truest spirits by having our own Santa Claus (played by Naveen Bhargav) distributing gifts to all the employees.

We also had a Christmas tree wonderfully decorated.