Experts in Everything

28 April 2017

I have been involved in the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) recently; an excellent industry group that discusses, (and influences policy on) the cloud industry, whatever that is. In this context, cloud is an IT set of tools across the broadest possible definition that deliver IT functions as a service.

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RPA : The Robots are coming

03 April 2017

Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, has been bubbling around for a few years now. I learnt about it because a friend of mine decided to start a business specialising in RPA a few years ago, and I’ve been following it ever since. I think it has developed sufficiently now to start really taking notice.

I attended a fantastic analyst briefing last week by Everest Group on the shape of the RPA market. It made the concept very easy to understand and I would recommend making the time to watch the playback if you can (email me for a link). If not the summary is below.

RPA is effectively using software to emulate human interactions with a process or programme. It tends to only deal with Structured Data, and delivers a deterministic solution to a problem – i.e. currently there isn’t a great deal of intelligence in the handling of the process. It's designed to relieve users of high volume monotonous processing functions.

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Marketing Buzzwords : GDPRexiTrumpY2Kloud

19 April 2017

Buzzwords drive me nuts. The marketing machines latch on to them to the exclusivity of everything else and although many of the topics are important, they become lost in the race to associate a product or service to the topic.

Take GDPR for instance. It’s prolific! Everyone on social media these days is getting bombarded with a million posts a minute about the latest and greatest way to overcome the risks of this looming legislation. Based on some of the marketing bumph; if you were a naïve buyer, you would assume that purchasing a firewall could protect you from literally thousands of pages of complex data protection legislation relating to some abstract and complex concepts regarding identity and consent which I don’t profess to fully understand.

The same happened with Brexit, Trump, Y2k and Cloud. In an attempt to scare people into buying their product, IT and Telecoms vendors jumped on the various buzzword bandwagons to try and tenuously link their bland dull services to something people might care about. The issue this creates however, is the dilution of the actual message, to a point where the noise becomes unbearable and people switch off. This is the polar opposite of what the industry needs right now.

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Who pays the middle man?

29 March 2017

Service brokerage as a concept has a dirty image.  Paying a middle man to help find a service seems counter intuitive, when the world is full of information at the touch of a button.  IT people are probably the most sensitive to this, usually intelligent, tech savvy, suspicious individuals who would much rather do their own research than pay someone else to do it for them.  I get it, I am one.

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